Soledad.

• Position: Book review

Soledad, by Augie Cruz. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

The title character of Cruz's first novel is an independent-minded, twenty-year-old art student who is proud of her tiny apartment shared with a roommate in Manhattan, and ashamed of the ghetto where she was raised. But she must return home when a crisis arises (her mother becomes ill), and she is forced to face the cultural element of her barrio and examine her mother's history. As in Perez's Geographies of Home, this character will discover family secrets or skeletons in the closet, but their discovery takes on a supernatural nature.

Soledad is an apt name for a character who prefers to live apart from her family despite traditional convention and mores. She aspires to a life different from that of her mother, aunt, and female cousin, who remain at home caring for the men in their families. Now Soledad is scolded for trespassing patriarchal dictates. In her own thoughts, she begins to evaluate memories and stories from the past. These include her mother's origins as a prostitute who was purchased Coy the man Soledad assumes to be her father) and brought to New York. Her mother had stated that he saved her. He died when Soledad was a teenager, and now that her mother is in a state where she cannot speak, her daughter's thoughts relate other perspectives. Her mother's husband was a drunk and a wife-beater who accidentally fell to his death from a window in their fifth-floor apartment. As Soledad descends into remembrances of her childhood, she recalls the sexual abuse perpetrated by him, and her mother's apparent involvement in his fall.

While Soledad is the principal chronicler, other characters also tell their stories in first or third person, revealing their mental states: Her teenage cousin Flaca tries to send her mother telepathic "go to sleep messages." Soledad's mother's perspective is told through her thoughts in...