A Good House - second hand

"Terrific stories...Just about perfect" ( Entertainment Weekly ): Brownsville is the collection that established Oscar Casares as one of the leading voices in the literature of the modern Southwest.



At the country's edge, on the Mexican border, Brownsville, Texas, is a town like many others. It is a place where people work hard to create better lives for their children, where people bear grudges against their neighbors, where love blossoms only to fade, and where the only real certainty is that life holds surprises.



In his sparkling debut, Oscar Casares creates a cast of unforgettable characters confronting everyday possibilities and Diego, an eleven-year-old whose job at a fireworks stand teaches him a lesson in defiance; Bony, a young man whose discovery of a monkey's head on his lawn drives a wedge between him and his parents; Lola, whose stolen bowling ball offers an unlikely chance for change. The achievement of Brownsville lies in its remarkably honest portrayal of these lives -- the lives of people whose dreams and yearnings and regrets are at once unique and universal.




"Marvelous... Brownsville resembles early Steinbeck work more than anything else." --Carolyn See, Washington Post

Kate Barnes is fourteen years old when she first experiences the strange gifts she has inherited from her grandmother's side of the family. She has a vivid waking dream, a memory of an earlier life centuries before in the small Somerset village of Oakey Vale when she was murdered by an angry mob who believed her to be a witch. Her grandmother decides the time is right to reveal to Kate some family secrets, including the ancient cave which houses the family tomb. However, just as Kate is learning to develop her second sight, her education with her grandmother is interrupted when her father insists she return to London. He is determined that Kate forget her grandmother's teachings and get a job in order to help support their growing family. But nothing will keep Kate from her to take her grandmother's place as local wise woman and guardian of the mysterious cave . . .

A work of dazzling imagination that takes as its theme the price the true scientist or artist must pay for his calling in terms of his own humanity, his ability to live fully.