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The Madonnas of Echo Park

by Brando Skyhorse (Goodreads Author)

3.52 of 5 stars 3.52 · rating details · 1,046 ratings · 232 reviews

We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours.

With these words, spoken by an illegal Mexican day laborer, The Madonnas of Echo Park takes us into the unseen world of Los Angeles, following the men and women who cook the meals, clean the homes, and struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream.

When a dozen or so gi...more

Hardcover, 199 pages

Published June 1st 2010 by Free Press

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Aug 06, 2011 Larry Hoffer added it · review of another edition

Echo Park, the Los Angeles neighborhood down the hill from Chavez Ravine, is the setting for Brando Skyhorse's interconnected story collection, The Madonnas of Echo Park. (I think Brando Skyhorse may be one of the coolest names I've ever heard for an author.)

The characters in Skyhorse's stories are Mexican-Americans of varying ages who are trying to fit in with or rebel against their culture and their neighborhood. Many of the characters are the types of people we pass by every day—cleaning wom...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Robert Starner added it

This is a book that I will definitely need to revisit. I am not sure that it got my undivided attention, and this book respectfully commands and deserves it. The author presents a kaleidoscope of imagery and characters that populate the ethnic neighborhood of Echo Park buried in downtown L.A. Much like the movie Crash, Skyhorse weaves and interconnects the stories of many inhabitants of Echo Park through familial and non-familial relationships with one of the main events involving the driveby sh...more

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May 08, 2013 Luke Schwiebert rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book will surprise you. Not in its themes or its writing style (though the former are important and the latter is excellent), but in it's presentation: every single chapter is told by a different character. This isn't made obvious at first, so you may get thrown for a loop at the beginning of Chapter 2, but once you figure it out, it really works.

I've read some other reviews that say that Madonnas "isn't really a novel, more like a short story collection." I guess that's true on its face, s...more

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Jul 24, 2012 Madeline Knight-Dixon rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that is constantly making you think, and constantly realize how ignorant Americans are. It’s about Echo Park, a Latino neighborhood in LA that is predominately Mexican. One of the chapters focuses on illegal workers, how terribly their treated and how much they are looked down upon even from people in their own community. The novel constantly struggles with are you a Mexican-American, or an American-Mexican.

At its core, the book is about identity. Can you escape your c...more

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Jun 03, 2012 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse is a breathtaking novel, a connected set of short stories, which explores the predominately Mexican American neighborhood of Echo Park in East L.A. Each story relates the struggles of immigrants and first and second generation Mexican Americans and subtlety explores the themes of race, class, and assimilation. Skyhorse opens the world of gangs and drive-bys, day laborers and cleaning ladies, and in turn shows readers how the characters involved in the...more

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Mar 25, 2012 Danielle rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Madonnas of Echo Park is a must read for anyone curious about an increasingly diverse U.S. society. Skyhorse skillfully brings readers into Echo Park, and offers a holistic perspective on the many challenges its population faces. He develops a plot line that reads almost like a movie - each character's chapter/story seems unique and more revealing than the ones before until, suddenly, one realizes that the current narrator is actually the previous narrator's mother and a later character-narr...more

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Dec 28, 2011 Lauren rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: californiahistory, fiction

I had to read this novel because it takes place in my neighborhood of Echo Park, a historic piece of Los Angeles that has changed faces over the last several decades, first with white movie stars, then Mexican immigrants, then Chinese immigrants, and now a mix of Salvadoran immigrants and white hipsters. Told in a series of short stories with interwoven characters, The Madonnas of Echo Park paints a portrait of a 20th century Los Angeles Mexican community, where families struggle with violence,...more

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Nov 22, 2011 Elizabeth rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm glad I stuck with this audio book until the end because there was hope/Esperanza at the end. And I understand that feeling of watching a neighborhood change drastically--some of the inhabitants welcoming the changes and some of the inhabitants feeling lost. Overall, the stories were so gritty, depressing, violent and dysfunctional I didn't know if I could keep going. One of the characters worships Morrissey and I like Morrissey, too. But that is not the only music you want to put in your hea...more

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Mar 17, 2011 Constance rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: couldn-t-finish

Gosh, I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn't even finish it. The primary word that I keep thinking of to describe this book is "inartful." It is SO awfully and badly executed, in its voices, character descriptions, plot development, everything. It is also inconsistent and hard to follow! Did anyone edit this book?! Here's a one example of many: One chapter is written from the voice of an older Latina woman (another is uninterestingly written from the voice of a self-hating American-bo...more

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Jan 01, 2011 Jenny rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jenny by: Pete's book club

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This review is full of spoilers, so just a heads up, in case you want to read it. Like the jacket says, this guy is really reminiscent of Sherman Alexie (one of my top favorite authors) and Junot Diaz (only read one of his, but loved it). The story of existing in America, specifically LA, as a Mexican. When I started the second chapter, I thought oh, this is a collection of short stories. So it took me a minute to figure out that there are common characters weaving through the chapters; each cha...more This review is full of spoilers, so just a heads up, in case you want to read it. Like the jacket says, this guy is really reminiscent of Sherman Alexie (one of my top favorite authors) and Junot Diaz (only read one of his, but loved it). The story of existing in America, specifically LA, as a Mexican. When I started the second chapter, I thought oh, this is a collection of short stories. So it took me a minute to figure out that there are common characters weaving through the chapters; each chapter has a different narrator. Some were more compelling than others. I would say that overall it's a great read, in that aching, sad but beautiful kind of way. But beware there's some pretty graphic violence in it seemed like every chapter.

Some of the scenes that were memorable: when Aurora goes back to her Mom's house to help her clean, and she's cleaning their family pictures on the mantel. Back in high school, her Mom had taken a scissors and cut her father out of all the pictures. "That jagged space where my father used to be never looked right. When I was in high school, I overlaid Morrissey's image from glossy magazines into shots where my mother was holding on to a headless neck or kissing a crisp rip in front of a a tree that had been sliced in half. I pasted in Morrissey's picture because he was the kind of man who would never leave my mother, or abandon a child. His songs contain stories of endless devotion and his incapability of being loved by anyone. Why not give him, then, to someone who no longer had anyone to give her love to? Judging from these photos, Morrissey was a better father than my own was." (p 155)

Or when the Virgin Mary appears to the lonely older woman Beatriz: "There in the doorway of a block-long ninety-nine-cent store stood a shiny-faced teenage girl in ankle-length blue slacks and a matching blue coat spotted with a constellation of translucent stars, flat nurse's shoes, a red scarf wrapped around her head in the shape of a circlet to protect her fair skin from the sun, and a white lamb's-wool sweater with a fraying ring of delicate gold thread across her chest. There was nothing remarkable about her clothes--you'd find them at las tiendas descuentas up and down the block--but a young woman wearing such an old lady's outfit?... Plus it was a Tuesday--nobody's idea of a holy day. When I turned to look, she was walking alongside me, a beatific smile on her face, one that for a moment made me forget my wariness of strangers, the only people I mistrust more than my relatives." (p 60)

Some other quotes:

--"Cons make the best letter writers because inside every man is a poet. You just have to throw him in jail to find it." (p 112)

--About new friendships: "That wasn't me, so we stopped hanging out. It's okay, though, because you need to change your friends once in a while. That's how you become the person you're meant to be... the moment that pushes your friendship into something deeper, from friend to best friend, can't be seen when it's happening." (p 132-133)

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Dec 29, 2010 Jimmie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: los-angeles

There's been a string of critically acclaimed novels lately that are basically collections of interrelated character-driven vignettes with little plot (e.g., "Elegance of the Hedgehog," "Let the Great World Spin," "Olive Kitteridge," "The Imperfectionists"--which is one of my Top 5 reads of 2010). I think the book that comes the closest to "Madonnas" is James Frey's "Bright Shiny Morning," not only because they're both set in Los Angeles (or that they were both less well-loved by critics), but a...more

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Jul 23, 2010 Nancy Oakes rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

In a corner of Los Angeles, outside the small neighborhood mercado called El Guanaco, Friday afternoons belonged to a group of women and their daughters. The girls would dress in "Madonna-style outfits," turn on a portable cassette deck and dance, while their moms would clap their hands and provide encouragment. They did this because El Guanaco was the on-location film site of rock star Madonna's video for her song "Borderline," and also because this was their small gesture aimed at taking back...more In a corner of Los Angeles, outside the small neighborhood mercado called El Guanaco, Friday afternoons belonged to a group of women and their daughters. The girls would dress in "Madonna-style outfits," turn on a portable cassette deck and dance, while their moms would clap their hands and provide encouragment. They did this because El Guanaco was the on-location film site of rock star Madonna's video for her song "Borderline," and also because this was their small gesture aimed at taking back one of the most violent corners of the neighborhood, if only for a while. On one particular day, years ago, the mother of Aurora Esperanza wanted a picture, so the girls lined up. Aurora argued with her mother Felicia about kneeling with the little girls, wanting instead to stand with the women, and as they argued, a series of gunshots went off, leaving little 3 year old Alma Guerrero dead. The paper the next day would have a headline that read "Baby Madonna Murdered by Heartless Thugs." This one incident serves as the focal point of this novel, which is really more of a collection of short narratives told by several characters over several years. The rest of the novel is about people in this community left to deal with the incident in some way, especially Aurora and Felicia. The stories intersect as do the characters, who move in and out of the other characters' lives as some point as time goes on.

The characters are varied, but their stories have all have several points in common -- the themes of identity, place and dislocation running through the entire book. For example, there's the story of a former gang member, whose gang "used to own these streets," and who now sits with his son Juan at an upscale coffee shop on Sunset eating a "grilled cheese and soy bacon sandwich, made on seven-grain bread with organic, grass-fed, raw-milk cheddar." They keep coming back because "it's in the neighborhood." Or the story of Freddy Blas, coming back to Echo Park after being away in prison, and finding a different world when he returns. Or Felicia, whose early life had been uprooted at the same time as her grandmother lost her home in Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium and now makes her living as a cleaning lady, only to be uprooted once more. Or my favorite story about Efren Mendoza. He's a city bus driver who goes by the rules and who knows where people will be safe getting off of his bus, depending on their ethnic backgrounds. Efren has nothing but scorn and contempt for illegal immigrants because he's convinced they make problems for the hard-working Mexican-Americans like himself. He also singlehandedly causes a major riot by what he does when a fight breaks out on his bus.

It's amazing to think that Madonnas of Echo Park is Skyhorse's first novel. His characters are believable and real. There's also an overarching aura of humanity and dignity in every narrative and in the overall book as a whole. And he pulls off all of this without being preachy. And his choice of Echo Park as the setting for Madonnas is excellent, considering what's going on there lately regarding gentrification, higher rents, and the edging out of some of the members Latino community who've been there all of their lives. This is happening everywhere, but Echo Park is representative of this phenomenon in this novel.

I hope more people read this novel. I've heard something about Oprah touting it as a good summer read, but it goes well beyond just a light, easygoing book that you may want to read while laying out at the beach. While some of the story may have a bit more sentimentality than I normally like, it's definitely a book I'm happy to have read. And don't brush it off merely because of the subject matter -- I don't care which side of the political fence you are on, this is a book about the fate of a group of human beings. Bottom line.

as an aside: If you're interested, there's a really good video called "Gentrification Nation" at youtube that captures some of the current problems of Echo Park. (less)

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Jun 12, 2012 Denise rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

I loved this book! It’s been a delight to read it. Not only did it caught me from the very begining, it also moved me in so many ways all along its pages. I loved the way all the characters’ lives were interwoven and the overall rythm of the book. The characters are so rich and well constructed that it’s a pleasure to peep into their lives. Most of them even have a great sense of humor. I cryed and laughed with their stories. I also got dissapointed, mad and frustrated. I even felt nostalgic.

Th...more

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Feb 10, 2012 Leah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Interesting exploration of a side of Echo Park that I did not expect this to be about.

The title is brilliant but I won't say how.

I was really impressed with the voices. The narrator changes with every chapter, which threw me the first time, because there was nothing absolutely definite to cue me into the character change as the chapter began. But as I read, I thought to myself, "This feels very feminine, why is Hector being written like this?" Because (as was indeed confirmed about 1.5 pages in...more

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Sep 12, 2010 Eileen Granfors rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: families, local-color

Brando Skyhorse reveals in "The Madonnas of Echo Park" that he has what an exemplary author needs: the ability to create voice. In each chapter, we encounter a new narrator. Through his skill at interweaving the plot, the shifts are not jarring, for the characters have emerged through actions in previous episodes. I recognized each of them as they told their part of the story.

Skyhorse immerses us in neighborhood life in Echo Park, one of the more distinctive locales in Los Angeles. The character...more

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Mar 21, 2012 Heather rated it 3 of 5 stars

Not really sure what to think. This one really was a tough one. I would NOT categorize it a novel. It was more a collection of short stories that intertwine. A stretch to call it a novel. Even if they play off each other and explain things further down the timeline. Speaking of which was really hard to follow, now that I think about it.

This was a somewhat hard and harsh look at Mexicans and their lives in LA. Would have hopes to gain something from reading a boom like this, some sort of insight...more

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May 03, 2011 Karissa rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is the thing about this book: when I started it, I was convinced I was going to love it. From the meta-pseudobiographical author's note, to the first couple of stories, I was riveted. I loved the interweaving story idea to create a novel. I was drawn in by the language (though perhaps overwritten at times), I was intrigued by the characters who felt honest and compelling, and the book made me nostalgic for Southern California. I settled into chew through a book that I would be exhilarated b...more

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Jul 14, 2010 Ed rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, read-on-kindle, 4-stars, new-author-to-me, debut-novel

While I certainly enjoyed the book on its own merits, I found myself immediately comparing, mostly positively, vs. other novels... the coincidental (or magical) intersecting of lives recalled Let The Great World Spin... the authentic ethnic voice and edge was quite reminiscent of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao... and the nostalgia factor of the 1980s and a very particular place (also from a non-white perspective) made me think of Sag Harbor. While I know that's not terribly helpful if you...more While I certainly enjoyed the book on its own merits, I found myself immediately comparing, mostly positively, vs. other novels... the coincidental (or magical) intersecting of lives recalled Let The Great World Spin... the authentic ethnic voice and edge was quite reminiscent of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao... and the nostalgia factor of the 1980s and a very particular place (also from a non-white perspective) made me think of Sag Harbor. While I know that's not terribly helpful if you have not read those books, I'm guessing there is a good chance as all these books do seem to orbit in the same "Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..." universe.

Skyhorse brilliantly kicks things off with an author's note, recalling an episode for his youth that inspired, or perhaps more accurately haunted, him into writing this debut novel. The result is not only a love letter (though not often a pretty one) to his home, the ever-evolving Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park, but an attempt at some personal redemption. If that doesn't do it for you, it is hard not to be wow'd, particularly with the current contentiousness re: immigration, by the novel's opening line ("We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours.") as readers begin this journey of jumping in and out of the lives of the Mexican-Americans and American-Mexicans.

As for (mild) criticism, and with books/novels of this nature in general, a consistent quality from story to story is pretty much impossible to maintain. I thought many of the stories were truly great, while others were "good." As with Let The Great World Spin, a lot also rides on one's tolerance of happenstance, with Skyhorse tending to throw a twist at the end story/chapter. It's a bit of a literary tightrope walk and while I never felt he faltered, there were a few balance checks along the way. Lastly, since you don't have the full (or at least a more complete) picture until the end, this novel certainly would benefit from a re-reading, but who has time for that! But overall, a quite compelling and impressive debut.(less)

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Jun 20, 2010 Tattered Cover Book Store added it

Shelves: books-from-events, from-the-indienext-list, staff-recommends, jackie-recommends

Jackie says:

This book had me from the author's note, which begins, "This book was
written because of a twelve-year-old girl named Aurora Esperanza." It
seems that he, who was also 12 at the time, had said something terrible to her and then never saw her again, so was unable to apologize to her directly. He had to find a different way to apologize, and now, 25 years later, he has. In the form of this book. "I'm ready to dance with you, Aurora. This is my confession. I hope you understand why I need...more

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Jun 19, 2010 Jackie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: work-review-related-reading

This book had me from the author's note, which begins, "This book was
written because of a twelve-year-old girl named Aurora Esperanza." It
seems that he, who was also 12 at the time, had said something terrible to her and then never saw her again, so was unable to apologize to her directly. He had to find a different way to apologize, and now, 25 years later, he has. In the form of this book. "I'm ready to dance with you, Aurora. This is my confession. I hope you understand why I need to say th...more

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Apr 05, 2011 Niree rated it 5 of 5 stars

Despite the prevalence of death, several unreliable narrators, and derogatory observations, Madonnas of Echo Park is a simply beautiful piece of work. A few chapters in, I was hesitant to regard it as a novel, though it proudly calls itself as such on the cover; but halfway through, I accepted it. The characters are interwoven into each other's stories with such calculated but subliminal ease, I'm itching to go back and make a tree for their relationships. Skyhorse really brings Echo Park to lif...more

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Jun 08, 2010 Toni rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I have been talking a lot about this book at work because it just excites me. One of the marketing blurbs about it that I read said that it will do for Mexican-Americans what Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which I LOVED) did for Dominican-Americans. What that means is that there isn't a lot of mainstream fiction that displays the lives of the various ethnic communities in this country. Especially of the non-white ones.

What makes this book special is the author's note at the b...more

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Feb 03, 2011 JennEllen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club-2010

Thank goodness for book club. This is not a book I would have even given a second glance on my own, but I am so glad that it was a book club pick. I really enjoyed it--once I figured out what was going on. The writing is brilliant--it's rare to find a male author who can write female characters well. The storyline is choppy and unclear at times, due to the fluid movement through time and characters, but the enjoyment comes not from the plot so much as from figuring out the relationships among al...more

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Oct 19, 2010 Mandee rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: checked-it-out

I'm really torn with how to rate this book.

The bookcover says The Madonnas of Echo Park A Novel, but in this case I think the A Novel add-on is subjective. It's really a collection of short stories at most, and in my opinion it's probably not even quite that. Each chapter is written from a different character's POV, but each chapter is not a full story, short or otherwise. Each character may or may not have some connection to another chapter's character, however slight it may be. I realize this...more I'm really torn with how to rate this book.

The bookcover says The Madonnas of Echo Park A Novel, but in this case I think the A Novel add-on is subjective. It's really a collection of short stories at most, and in my opinion it's probably not even quite that. Each chapter is written from a different character's POV, but each chapter is not a full story, short or otherwise. Each character may or may not have some connection to another chapter's character, however slight it may be. I realize this is starting to sound like I despised the book but that's not completely true. Some of the chapters were interesting. In fact, some of the chapters were good enough for me to rate 3.5 or 4 stars if the book would have ended up having a story in it. Apparently some people think the story was written in a similar style as the movie Crash, and I can see how they could think that, because each character usually related to someone else in the book in some way, but from what I remember of Crash all the seemingly unrelated characters ended up coming together to play a part in an actual story with a climax (symbolic and literal crash) and with a point to the story. I didn't feel that way with The Madonnas of Echo Park. I felt like it didn't really matter that one character dated another character's former best friend because there was no real revelation or meaning behind connecting them. Generally it didn't even improve either story either. And the same goes for most of the other characters' connections.

What was apparent was that the author wanted to show the evolution of a location: the Echo Park (and Chavez Ravine) neighborhood of LA, and how that evolution effected the Mexican immigrants who lived there. It is literally just about the Mexican immigrants, though. At certain points he acknowledges that not only Mexicans inhabit this area, but all his characters are Mexican. The author did a decent job at showing this evolution through his different characters' voices. Not only that, but once I realized that every new chapter meant a new POV I thought he did a decent job at creating a distinct and realistic voice for some of the characters too, be them younger, older, male, or female.

The book starts off with a long author's note that made me think of something interesting. He talks about how he did something bad to one of his classmates and he wanted to apologize to her but he was never able to because she didn't return to school after their holiday break. It was what he felt about what he did that struck me as interesting. He apparently felt a cultural and socioeconomic divide with his other classmates. He got MTV before everyone else and therefore was exposed to English and American pop music when most of his other classmates were still listening to Spanish music or old music. When his class decided to have a dance he didn't want to look too uppity so he brought a single of something, I don't remember what, but one of the girls, Aurora, brought Madonna's full album. She was the first to put her's on and she put on Borderline, which was apparently a huge deal in LA at the time because of the video or something having a chola vibe to it. Well, I guess what happened was, he was expected to dance with her by the teacher or something, but he didn't think that was a good idea. The music was starting and they were in place but instead of dancing with her he said, "I can't dance with you because you're Mexican." She was apparently speechless or something and why not, because some kid, who is also Mexican, btw, just told her she wasn't good enough to dance with not because he didn't like her but because of something she could do nothing about, her ethnicity. Too bad she didn't think to say, And what the hell do you think you are??? But honestly, I kinda related to his story.

I lived in Signal Hill in Long Beach (about as close to LA is it gets as far as I know) for a few years growing up from about the age of 7 to 9 or so. And the school I went to was dominantly black and white with a few token latinos and asians. My brother and I being two of about four or five of noticably latino decent (we're half and halfers.) Anyway, what I'm getting at is that for some reason at this point in my life I didn't realize I was any different from whoever I was with at any given time. If I was talking to one of my black friends I thought I was the same as her, if I was with one of my white friends I thought I was just like her. I truly didn't realize we were different. And at some point during third grade I realized I didn't look like my mom. So I asked her, "Why don't I look like you?" She asked me what I meant and I said, "Why is my skin darker than yours?" And do you know what she told me? She said, because you're tanned. (!) Because I was outside all the time. (!) And so I said, "Well I'm gonna stay inside then because I wanna look like you!" (I was so sincere too!) We kept talking about it some more, but I find this so funny and outrageous now! But the point is, I didn't realize I was Latina either. Unlike the author, though, I was never told that I was better than any other ethnic group, thank goodness. The funny thing is, my mom was right! My skin really was that color because I was tanned! Now my skin is really not much different than my mom's except it has an olive tone to her peachy one, but if you put our hands side by side the color shade is very, very close. All my other features are very ethnic though :). (less)

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Sep 09, 2010 Liz rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Meh. I only got through the first couple of chapters. I was really put off by the opening "author's note" (which was really more like a prologue) in which we find out that the book is sort of an extended apology to the girl he insulted back in junior high. The thing is, he goes and makes her a character in the book, essentially co-opting her story and her voice. I found that to be rather incongruous, and the whole "mea culpa" tone was too much. (I had thought that guilt-ridden whiny MFA fiction...more

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Jul 16, 2010 Robert Intriago rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

The book opens with great hope of a book about the legal and illegal immigrants that lived in the area of LA known as Chavez Ravine and Echo Park and how the Mexican Americans living in that area are first displaced by Dodger Stadium and then by gentrification of their neighbourhood. The beginning offers so much promise, I thought it would be another "The Help", but I was disappointed by the entire story.

The book is a series of vignnettes about the plight of the Mexican people in the LA Area, fr...more

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Feb 13, 2013 Mal rated it 3 of 5 stars

A cool look at a world I've never experienced: the Mexican ghetto in LA. Skyhorse prefaces the story with a short memoir of his own that I think you should read--not only does it give a great set up to the book, but it lets you see into the mind and emotions of the author a little more. (Of course, books kind of do that anyway, but still.)

A heads up: each chapter is a different character and I know that's not everyone's thing, so that could be distracting for some people. I personally loved tha...more

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Jul 06, 2010 oriana marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: the-new-new-new-new-thing, to-read-soon

I feel like I've already heard of this, and I think it's another one of those smarty hip-ish books where I'm the primary demographic audience and of course I'm going to read it pretty soon. (Though that's what I thought about An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, which I just finished, which blew, so WTF, who knows.)

Anyway! Here's what the Greenlight Bookstore newsletter says about this one:

Each chapter of the writer's debut introduces a new resident of the Los Angeles neighborho...more

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Jul 25, 2010 George rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nook-ereads

MUY BUENO. VERY CLEVER STORIES.

“Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust and irony are the holy trinity of my religion…” –page 147/185

‘The Madonnas of Echo Park,’ by Brando Skyhorse, is a collection of eight, very clever short stories; some I absolutely loved, like ‘The Cool Kids’ and others, such as ‘La Luz y laTierra,’ that I found confusing and could have happily done without—but all very clever and very cleverly tied toge...more

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Sep 02, 2010 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2010

Although I ended up rating this book 4 stars, I debated before deciding. I think I would actually rate it 3 stars for writing, and 4 stars to educational/emotional value.

The 3 stars for writing is because sometimes the book was difficult to follow. Each chapter is a sort of short story about a mexican immigrant character is Los Angeles. The characters are all tied together somewhat, but I found that difficult to follow. I felt like I needed a chart or something to show all the connections. I als...more

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About Brando Skyhorse

Born and raised in Echo Park, CA, Brando Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine. For the past ten years he has worked in New York publishing as a book editor. His next book, also forthcoming from Free Press, is entitled Things My Fathers Taught Me, a memoir about growing up with five stepfathers.

Contact the author at his website.

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Quotes from The Madonnas of Echo Park

“The time between your first major fight with your best friend until you make up is, for a teenage girl, about as long as it took for God to create the universe. . . . It's excellent training for having a boyfriend.” — 16 people liked it

“Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.” — 12 people liked it

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The Madonnas of Echo Park

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