"You want to know what I really think?" Manuel continued. The kiss in front of the parents things was totally weird, I mean, what? I'm missing her today, I never talked to her about queer issues but I sort of know she would have been awesome about it. My grandmother used to say something like this, "Quien nada hace, nada se equivoca". When I thought it could have been used way more, but maybe Sanchez doesn't speak enough Spanish.Ī person who makes no mistakes probably won't make anything. Those are small steps in reclaiming my Mexican heritage, but huge pieces in making me whole.
It's pretty much over with a few lines: One other big change is that I've started going by Pablo once more, instead of Paul, and I've started speaking Spanish again. I kept waiting for Paul/Pablo's rejection of his Mexican identity to be addressed since it felt that it was related to his rejection of his homosexuality and getting over one would mean getting over the other. It's a sweet story, even if Pablo's monologue is a bit repetitive sometimes and many characters seem too amazing to be real. (To make matters worse at the end of the book you get a GLOSSARY with translations, so any monolingual reader had to turn a few pages to find out the meaning of courtesy greetings and other simply phrases easily deduced by the English context. Seriously, if they don't know that "ay, que guapo" means "oh, how handsome" when the main character's father's girlfriend says it, what's gonna be lost? Maybe they'll go and check a fucking dictionary instead of getting everything spoonfed in English as if bilingualism was only possible for speakers of other languages. The way anything in Spanish is immediately repeated in English also annoys the fuck out of me. I'm glad I did :)Įven though Alex Sanchez is a Latino author, the details about Mexican culture feel startlingly generic (".my favourite chocolate, a brand you can only get in Mexico." the main character says, never mentioning the brand.) The mention of Mexican cuissine and the random Spanish words that sound completely anglizised, of couse, Spanglish speakers do not speak what I feel is Spanish, but the vocative "amigo" still feels remarkably odd to me as a native speaker, like a calque of "friend", no Spanish speaker I have ever heard addresses their friends that way (The closest I can think is "amigo mío" which is archair like whoa). XD) But I came accross The God Box and almost without meaning to, found myself caught. Sanchez a pass (re-reading what I thought of that book I'm a bit confused as to why I remembered him being so mediocre. After Rainbow BoysI thought I'd just give Mr.
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