Francisco

by Alison Mills Newman, Saidiya Hartman (Introduction)

Alison Mills Newman’s novel Francisco—"profoundly underappreciated" (NY Times) has long been out of print and impossible to find. Written in her early twenties in a “fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English" (Harryette Mullen), Mills Newman tells the vibrant story of a young black woman's love affair with an indie filmmaker, Francisco. Described as "a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself" in the new foreword by Saidiya Hartman, Francisco unfolds like an on-the-road diary of a young actress and musician as she becomes increasingly disillusioned with success in Hollywood. She chronicles her bohemian life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, and her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders, Melvin Van Peebles, Frank Silvera, and Amiri Baraka make appearances, along with other artists and writers like Ishmael Reed and Joe Overstreet. Love and friendship, long revealing conversations, parties and dancing in Berkeley and LA—Francisco celebrates “the workins of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth … the gift of art for the survival of the human heart.”

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, Literature, Contemporary, Novels, Womens

117 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2023

Reviews

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to write a novel (memoir?) so warm and conversational and unpretentious that also reads like poetry. Loved it!! So incredibly joyful, a book about falling in love very seriously for the first time while at the same time learning to love yourself and be comfortable in your skin in an often hostile world. Big recommend!

[lostcupofstars · Rating 2 out of 5]

The afterword ruined this book imo.

I had a few gripes throughout it, the politics in this book were very middle class and I didn’t like the fact that the protagonist rebuked Angela Davis only to praise Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X in the same breath.
The whole thing had pick me energy.
A few stand out quotes but the afterword knocked down everything the novel had built and that was a real shame.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three short passages from Francisco:


*


life ain’t no hollywood production (no matter how much money they might spend to make me think it is.)


*


and i wish people who made all these movies responded to quality more often. i mean, i wish some of this copy cat copy would disappear now and then. but folks don’t seem to produce quality on purpose, they dilute it till it don’t exist no more, after it sounds like, looks like somethin that’s already been seen a million times. originality remains at the bottom of the disposal in the sink of seas.


*


opinion: equivalent to imagination. truth knows no time (it doesn’t pay to be honest) is free of time, just is. opinions based on truth opinions based on lies. more opinions based on lies control the earth. trouble is everybody thinks his opinion is the truth. the world is controlled by opinions of those who possess the powa ova the imagination of the times, people, culture, mind. communicatin opinions based on lies. we spend most of our time fightin for the better bull versus the not so good bull. bull is bull. you cannot vote for the lessa of two evils. evil is evil. the work of all good men is to make a good truth a reality. the dream of all good men. those men are usually destroyed by those who wish to maintain the opinions of the time. imagination is as limitless as many minds that are free to explore their own visions, or destinies. you only live once. why miss out on being you?


*

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not usually one for the novel-in-paragraphs but I loved the propulsion of this. Felt equally conversational and witty and smart and beautiful, and conjured the atmosphere of a summer day hangout.

[tori gm · Rating 4 out of 5]

strange, sensual, survivalist. sexual as well as stoic, Alison Mills Newman hides her youth behind the guise of a novella and the writing flow is so surrealist that you can believe it to be fictitious. Unsure what is true or not, this novel is great at communicating the way it is to be a young woman so fiercely thoughtful that the world goes by without her interjection. i thought it was a wonderful piece of writing and opened me up and explored, conversed every time she sidebars. it feels like standing in a conversation, watching others speak, when suddenly Alison turns to you and adds context or pulls you into the conversation.
Mills-Newman holding a mirror to the dual coast 1970s black arts movement at the side of her life-long love, Francisco.

[Andre(Read-A-Lot) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm. Really not sure why this is billed as a novel, it more memoir or at the very least auto-fiction. I like the unconventional structure of the book and the nonlinear flow of the sentences. It’s a fairly interesting story of a young lady trying to navigate her way through the arts world of California. Along the way she meets Francisco and falls for him, and the book kind of chronicles their time and struggles together. Meh.

[Hailey Skinner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lauren sent me this book for Christmas!! <3 It was bohemian & lovely & a perfect addition to my collection of 1970s cool girls. I finished it just after midnight on New Years. (Party girl!)

Throughout the read I was struck by the narrator's utter submission to the whims of her man. To her, Francisco's dreams are more important than her dreams. She cooks for him, cleans for him, and would've handed over her trust fund to him, had her family allowed it. Most strikingly: he's named, she's not. She writes beautifully, and yet her talent is often used to articulate his.

I was fascinated to find such traditional submission amidst bohemian counter culture. And while it starkly contrasted the accounts of most 1970s cool girls, it didn't bother me. If anything, it reminded me of my own upbringing & of my mom. She devoted herself to my dad, opting to stay at home with us kids while he set off into the world (of sales lol but still). This lifelong level of sacrifice & devotion is one only women seem capable of...or at least seem expected to be capable of. It's not in me, and yet it raised me. I'm grateful for it.

("Just because my dreams are different than yours, it doesn't mean they're unimportant." Duh!)

Lastly, the added afterward wasn't my fave, but if that's what it took to get this republished, okay!!

[Imani ♥ ☮ · Rating 4 out of 5]

opinion: equivalent to imagination. truth knows no time (it don't pay to be honest) is free of time, just is. opinion based on truth opinions based on lies. more opinions are believed than truths. more opinions based on lies control the earth. trouble is everybody thinks his opinion is the truth. the world is controlled by opinions of those who possess the powa ova the imagination of the times, people, culture, mind.

this is a really fascinating little book. i call it little not as a diminutive, but because it really is quite tiny (but it doesn't feel like that when you're reading it). to say i enjoyed it is a little strange because this is basically a memoir of a young black women fighting against hollywood's anti-blackness and i never know what it means to enjoy reading about someone's life. let's say instead that it inspired me and it made me feel like i was really back in the 70s before everything was everything. it's funny that so much feels the same and yet, even the trajectory of the author's life reveals how much things change in reaction to what was before. the end was very shocking; i liked most of everything up to that part. maybe more than fascinating is psychedelic; it really puts you in that 70s mindset.

[The Lazy Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

You MUST read this book if you love young love, art (and not in the pretensious Bushwick "starving artist secretly funded by my parents way" but in a real, honest, "creation to save the human soul" way), movies, discussions about quality, dinner parties, the 70s, California, and especially if you like reading contemporary fiction but feel like things written in the 2020s fall flat for you because this baby has NUANCE. If you're a big quotes person, this book is your treasure trove. I'm tongue-tied trying to articulate why this book captivated me as much as it did, but truly, it's just the honesty of it all. It feels like Alison Mills Newman really just wrote from the heart, left it all out on the line, and I really responded to the vulnerability. It makes me yearn for a time when everyone wasn't all online and thinking the same thoughts and people were really trying to carve out a unique place for themselves in this world. Ugh! So good, an instant favorite.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book in an article that suggested memoirs based on your favorite modern It Girl. This one was paired with Ayo Edibiri so obviously I ordered it immediately lol. I was even more stoked when I found out the book had actually been out of print for years and has just recently been re-released?? (The new cover is disappointing tbh :/ I feel like they could’ve done something much cooler to reflect the hype that is Alison’s life traveling across SF, LA, and NY with her director boy in the 70s but that’s okay)

For someone that loves the decade’s music, movies, style, etc. so much it’s a shock that this is my first try at 70s It Girl Lit. And it may be my last since Francisco was too perfect? I don’t know if other attempts would live up to this one for me.

Alison Mills Newman is so casually cool, it hurts. Her writing is honest and poetic. The order of events, names of characters, and pieces of dialogue are all jumbled together in a way that should be confusing but isn’t. Even her nicknames for people feel like they urgently need to be underlined and saved forever.

Only thing I could’ve done without was the preachy afterword. Like Newman when she wrote the book, I’m an impulsive twentysomething in LA and I don’t super want to imagine my future self regretting my current life choices. Not a huge deal and definitely not a reason to avoid the book altogether, but you’ll get it if (when🙏😩❤️) you read it.

[M R · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a random pick up at the library and I'm so glad that I saw it, read it and that it is now in print again after largely being unavailable, wholly unexpected and a true gem. I will be buying this book. Even though this book was initially published in the 70s the themes and some of the things she talks about our still so relevant in 2023. There's an edge that is raw and fresh, even decades later. I had so many passages marked in my book. I will say that the afterword took me by surprise, but she's lived a life and I'm so grateful that she shared this work with us. I felt such a connection to this woman who is sort of aimless and in love (or trying to be) and I loved the way that she spoke about her experience and seemed to call it like she sees it, but also how she saw things. A short, but powerful book. Some moments I especially liked:

"...so i did. i danced. i danced till my body was loose and i could feel these lights - these electrical currents comin out of me. see, i love to dance, i love to dance in the rain. somethin in my spirit just comes alive when i'm dancin."

"we talked about revolutionists. i hate revolutionists. i'm tired of all that who shot john. they all turn out to be movie stars in this country anyway. or the government puts them in jail and fucks with their brains through some drugs producing chemical changes then releases them when they can't see straight no more. seems like most of the breakthroughs have been broken up. seems like almost everybody has been bought.

we decided revolutionists are somebody - anybody who does somethin true in this world - free from being held back by the manipulative powa money established controlling, deciding, structures at present. in terms of films, black films - we decided that sweetback bad ass song was revolutionary filn in that it was a true success financially for melvin van peebles, and the most original film out there."

"he had to have a credit card to rent it. green money crisp and real wouldn't rent a car. it don't make no sense to me how money won't even rent a car in this bureaucratic jail. i mean ain't money suppose to be the standard form of exchange? i mean ain't money supposed to buy everythin? ain't it? first they tie you up by makin you got to work factory hours day in day out to get by. then they tie you up forcin folks to get credit cards. i mean what is this?"

"the first day i got here i walked out on the beach alone, took off all my clothes and faced my fear of the raging black ocean, and soaked myself in its madness. the ocean is an old friend."

THE ENTIRE SCENE WITH JOHN DAVIS MARSHALL FROM PAGE 64 - 73!!!! Perfection. I loved it. She really read him for filth and then the background with her parents and the historical reasoning? Chef's kiss.

"...occasionally listening to the neurotic old rich and young rich. the old rich committed to their neocolonialism. the young rich feeling guilty because they knew they were the neocolonialism, confused as to what to do with their lives. life having no goal, cause the american dream (goal) was already conquered for them. listening to white women informing me as how they were darker than me. (yeah, but i don't have to work at it.)" PREACH!!!

"(i remember what i want to remember, i forget what i want to forget. that's the only way i can stay afloat. and the rest you don't care about. i laughed ...)"

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Newman’s freeform autobiographical 1974 novel depicts a soulful young Black woman’s search for self at the height of the Black Arts movement. Growing up a middle class child actor, our heroine grows disillusioned with “working for a man who was makin a fortune off a people he thought to little of.” Eschewing blaxploitation cinema, “the last onslurge of black slop,” she has an epiphany talking with an auto mechanic with a smile “like the root of a tree, so deep, so alive. …that old black man was music.” Enter idealistic documentarian Francisco, whose blazing star she orbits from Hollywood to Berkeley to Malibu, inspired and eclipsed by her longing and devotion to the “one nigga who thinks he can change the world,” amidst the fading afterglow of the sixties as it “seems like almost everybody has been bought.” A new afterword offers a surprising yet perhaps inevitable coda to the author’s spiritual quest. A bildungsroman like no other, this fecund, funky brew evokes a memorable era of possibility and perplexity, while sounding the obscure depths of love, sacrifice, and selfhood.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

a beautiful narrative written by a young woman living on the west coast and getting in and out of a career as an actor. it's really a love letter to francisco, the fellow she spends most of her time with and to whom she has dedicated her thoughts presented in this book.

the voice is really what sells it. it's pure, honest, clear, urban, smart, tender, it's a wise voice that doesn't suffer fools. it's about love, it's about family, it's about careers, it's about being black in the early 70's, it really sums up a lot in simple ways. not a novel to change your life, but a story that maybe gives you a bit of grace by coming in contact with it, and a dose of humanity.

4 1/2 stars (i write it because GR doesn't offer half star rating options)

[Matthew André · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who has struggled with being able to get through a book, the short-form style and intentional sporadic nature of the plot was extremely important for me. The structure of the book mirrored the emotional rollercoaster that the main characters were on which made the book feel immersive. Also had some extremely powerful messages about perseverance and black resilience, as well as making me re-romanticize city life through the lens of intrigue in the history each and every brick and plank is steeped in. The ending was a little strange to me, followed by the drastic change the author presented in the afterword. Made it feel less cohesive towards the end.

[aliya · Rating 3 out of 5]

literally sat my ass down w a cup of tea and finished it bc it was sadly so short. but so well written. although i will say some parts literally made me lol bc ??? i was just flabbergasted. but yeah it was quite beautiful actually. giving it a 3.75. oh and also it felt like a conversation which was interesting. i will say it might not work for everyone bc at some parts i was like …… but i pushed through. it was short and sweet and made me smile and yeahhhhh

[Isabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

need to do some more reading on this one bc the foreword already contextualized a lot for me and but really interesting writing style, sensuous and vibrant. I love any novel about an aimless woman and to see that not only politicized but rendered through this auto fiction in the 1970s Black Arts Movement🤌🏽

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

this belongs in the 70s California cool girl canon alongside didion and babitz

[Taylor Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stylistically inventive, fusing the vernacular, the colloquial, the idiosyncratic, the playful, Newman weaves a narrative of love, art, bohemia, blackness, in something of an almost epistolary celebration of youth and discovery.

[hannah ⭐️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really liked the vibe that this book created - the narrator just did languor and naivety in 70s hollywood SO WELL (also bonus points for the fact that she used the same grammar rules that i use to text lol)

not sure i loved the lack of chronology or narrative structure, but i think that’s more of a personal preference rather than a flaw with the text (also feels like it’s on me for reading it on 2 flights where i wasn’t 100% focused)

[Merricat Blackwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do think the narrative voice of this novel is wonderful - loose and luxuriant, rhythmic with a great appreciation of the value of the sudden and staccato. However, it's mostly listening to people have conversations, and very often the conversations are about things like how contraception is a fraud because women can control pregnancy with their minds. It's not surprising to me that the author became a socially conservative Christian not long after writing this; there's a kind of gendered woo-woo built on admiration of power hierarchies ("there isn't a black woman who can't rememba somewhere inside her, that once she was recognized as a queen") that reads radical in style but has obvious points of sympathy with evangelical trads.

[ica · Rating 4 out of 5]

really lovely novel in vignettes, plotless but sparkling with beautiful description of people & places and fine observations of the social lives of Black artists in the 70s. sometimes difficult to stay focused through all the meandering but the associative poetic flow of thought is elegantly breezy. also the afterword about coming to God is fascinating??

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly I found this hard to follow (the only stream of consciousness writer I like is Toni Morrison), but I don't think it's really for me, and it's an interesting 1970s time capsule. Seems kind of name-droppy and all over the place with no resolution. I didn't get why Francisco was so great (he was a pretty uninvolved boyfriend) but surprise, in real life they got married and had 5 kids!

[tori]

3.75/4

I hadn't heard of this book before, but saw that Saidiya Hartman wrote the forward, so I was compelled to read it! This was a very interesting read with a stream-of-consciousness, diary-type format. Not much happens, but there were some great quotable moments and the discussions that happen can take interesting turns in their debates.

* (foreward - Saidiya Hartman) Her arms provide a refuge, often the only one possible. So, this no-longer muse learns to keep company with herself. It is the gift yielded by the errant path.
* (you can’t be everything to everybody, you end up being nothin to everybody.)
* why should she [Angela Davis] have to refer to marxism to back up her statements, when she could refer to her own heritage, to africa, to a time a place a people that existed before marx was thought of… she could refer to a whole culture, history that was her own
* but i realized i was talkin to an adult who felt she should be right just because she had lived longa, and besides what did i know?
* i haven’t lived at home for a long time, so i’m gettin to know my dad again. it’s nice. it is. (parents have dreams too.)
* if you call knowin how to love watchin children die at the whim of her [white woman] white mate — or watchin a man used for the total benefit of her family’s welfare, instead of the benefit of his own family that don’t probably exist no more walkin around smiling in a white frilly hat — if that is your definition of KNOWIN HOW TO LOVE then i have nothin more to say.
* i existed before the media pretended to discover me. black people existed before black people discovered themselves.
* once a man told me somethin i had never heard before. he said the beauty of the black race stuns the white man… that’s why he made us think we were ugly. and anythin the white man cannot deal with frightens him — and he either destroys it or if he sees he can make some money, some profit he usurps, he uses, he misuses… he took our religion away because it scared the life out of him.
* there are a few things i can escape. a few things i can’t and there are a few things that escape me. excuse me please.
* i shall fly into the pastel colored smudged on my fingertips from paintin too many dreams on canvas, but i shall hang them up so that they may be real… so i can dance and sing all night long… to fulfill the capitalistic theory of girl (based on what i wear) what’s the difference, if i dress up pretty, i’m the same girl. knock on wood. but he doesn’t know that.
* enjoy youth, don’t endure it.
* how could he forget that we are all victims in this madness. (watch your dreams.)
* i can’t figure out all this mess, all i know is i cannot deny the places from which i come.
* the magic of life is that it does change. that you can’t say because a man is a drunk career ended, in jail, that his future is dead. you can’t say that marilyn monroe did herself a blessin by killin herself, because her career was ova, had she lived she’d be a de-escalated once-star, how many times married, drinkin drinkin. who is to say somethin wouldn’t have come into her life, that she could of moved to connecticut and wrote books?
* how did all these people get into powa who keep pushin all this garbage down our throats, who do we let them think we are? and how can we allow them to make us such shit, by our payin our hard-earned nickels and dimes, or sittin on our behinds watchin it. we accept it. not only do we accept it. we pay money for garbage. we pay money to look, laugh at, enjoy, and talk about did you see that garbage last week on channel so and so wasn’t it great? art can turn back the work of a people. entertainment has influence on the political moods of a people. movies can destroy all the work gone down, and make it cool to have no goals, to feel it’s noble to be poor, black, and strong, and excitin to be immoral, unprincipled, rich, and black. you can’t separate it from influencin the images (and lack of content, or content) or a searchin mind.
* they got us thinkin to express beauty in life is borin. unsensational. did they push that horror… down our throats so long that we think if we ain’t lookin at that, and doin that life is borin?… if i live in a world where love is not projected as a value, then wouldn’t i tend to believe that it don’t exist? how am i to know about love… revealin life, revealin the slimy parts along with the good is necessary, but gloryin the dirt is anotha story.
* i mean i woke up at eleven this mornin, after layin round rollin round, tossin and turnin round with this friend of mine. me.

[Patrick King · Rating 4 out of 5]

“i just looked out the window and saw that girl with two long braids walkin in the rain talkin to her secret invisible lova. the rain would shield her and she felt she could talk to her invisible love and no one would hear her cause the rain’s sound would surround her, and cover her voice while the cars splashed down the street — and the girl who use to sit in a.p. english and write poetry instead of takin notes on how to write a correct essay. that girl who would cry at somethin silly in a movie — the one who use to make mud pies in long island, n.y. with her ballet shoes on.”

“Malibu. (Muscle Beach, Annette Funicello, and Fabian, yeah, yeah, yeah.) it’s nice here. the first day i got here i walked out on the beach alone, took off all my clothes and faced my fear of the raging black ocean, and soaked myself in its madness. the ocean is an old friend. the first day i felt strange cause everybody got blonde hair around these parts. i mean everybody.”

What a book! Fast paced poetic and lyrical combining the story of a relationship with notes on Black struggle, liberation, and finding a way forward. The narrator and her paramour both have artistic ambitions but for a time (a month? a summer? a year?) she’s content to let his ambition subsume her. It’s a fascinating look at 70s LA and the struggle of trying to make it in the business and more than anything it’s a window into a life I’d never know.

But this wouldn’t be so incredible were it not also incredibly written. The style is singular—a mix of slang and phonetics that has a logic and structure all its own. There are some fantastic digressions (and reference to said digressions) that spin us momentarily into fantasy or back into reality.

What makes the book additionally touching is the afterward by Mills-Newman where she reveals that Francisco came back, that they were lovingly married, that they both created art and lived fulfilling lives on their own terms. Highly recommend.

[Marisa Duarte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Allison Mills Newman at the time of this writing was a young romantic living moment to moment in LA, following the dreams of her self-interested lover, a filmmaker trying to bring to life Black films that don't depend on the revival of everyday wyt supremacy. She herself as an actress and singer rejected many roles, preferring a somewhat bohemian existence where all she had to do was be Black and be woman, proudly, deliciously, unapologetically, even though at times she wondered how much she was woman and how much she was still a girl. Newman's writing is like a song, at times inviting the reader into the feel of heady living room parties or the mood of a glamorous screening gone flat. She characterizes the people she and Francisco encounter so deftly it feels like we can guess their odor and next temper. Mostly, reading this brings me to recognize the obstacles of young lovers of color expressing their romance in a society where Black is not beautiful, and what they do to insist that not only is Black beautiful, but rather, that it is so beautiful that it makes wyt folks look away in awe while also yearning for the attention of a handsome melanated couple in velvet pants and silver heeled shoes. Last note: Hartman's foreward: ingenious and sensitive, as her writing tends to be.

[meow]

Shoulda called it Alison because she’s the star of the show, I don’t know nothin about this Francisco guy besides he makes movies and he’s sensitive… read an excerpt of the very beginning and something really endeared to me about the first page w r t my personal life but then that situation changed and now I’m much more interested in the muse than the artist, which is amusing as those roles are completely reversed in Newman’s treatment—where in the plot she facilitates Francisco’s art career w some day to day managerial stuff, here She is the controversial artist and He is the figure spiritually gassing up the enterprise. Love how it ends like if Molly finished up her monologue w “Fuck Poldy just read the earlier stuff and he said to fuck off to my manager beau, shitttt 😅😅🥲🥲🥲”

I was also thrilled by the no indentations on line breaks… if I wasn’t amused by the content the modernist~ form kept me goin

Thank god for answering Newman’s prayer 20 years later like DO NOT censor your sinner past… there’s kind of an anachronism in the afterword but u also can’t say it’s not “realistic” haha

[Em H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Francisco is novella length piece of auto-fiction detailing a young Black woman's relationship with a filmmaker named Francisco, as well as her involvement in the arts scene (particularly film) in California in the 1970s.

The book reads like a series of diary entries, with the main character discussing conversations she's had with other Black bohemians and others in Hollywood, film, etc. There are some great moments that interrogate Black art and its relationship to dominant narratives and stereotypes about Black folk. The relationship between the MC and Francisco is a focal point of the story, but it's much more focused on his art and the everyday lives and conversations with the people around them.

It's an interesting little piece. I appreciate its lens and the way we get to see into the Black Arts Movement of the 70s. Definitely not a plot-y novel, so keep that in mind.

[Stephen Kearse]

"In an afterword, Mills Newman—who has called homosexuality a “sin” and queer people “scum” in interviews and sermons—says she hesitated to allow the book’s rerelease because she no longer endorses its “lifestyle of fornication.” She relented because she now views Francisco as a convert’s testimony. “i tenderly let go,” she writes, “in the hope that the knowledge of my encounter with Christ…can somehow give Glory to Yahweh and encourage others in their search for truth.'"

The addendum is conspicuous and technically noncanonical, but its call to submit to Christianity differs from the narrator’s supplicant yielding to Francisco only by degrees, a continuity worth considering. Beneath all the joys and subversions of Francisco lurks a more conventional story of a heterosexual woman’s identity dissolving into that of her man’s."

full review: https://www.thenation.com/article/cul...

[Neely Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've order both the print and electronic versions of Francisco because this work of art needs to be read both ways.

I have always, ALWAYS admired Alison Newman for her beautiful spirit, especially in writing. I've read her other books, including If You See Me Dancing and Maggie 3 and loved them! Her words are light, feathery, colorful, and artsy. You can use all five senses to experience the depth of them. I can feel the heartbeat of her writing through its amazing tonality and rhythm. Yes, there is rhythm in Alison Newman's writing. Francisco is truly a beautiful classic song.

[Elin Isaksson · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a lot of books about love, and the love between two people (man and woman). But what made this book unique to me is that it is not caught up with the feeling of love, the experience of it. Francisco is about Francisco, in all the ways that he is and why Newman loves him. I think that's really wonderful - to not fall in love with love but with a person and that really came through. The style was what drew me in initially and even though I liked it I did get a bit bored with it after a while and found it pretty dense so I found myself zoning out quite a bit.