Oscar Cásares

Where We Come From is a richly descriptive and emotionally wrenching novel. This story about the horrors of immigration is beautifully written. The story revolves around twelve-year old Orly and his god mother Nina. Nina has been harboring immigrants traveling from Mexico to the United States in an abandoned house.
About third way through the novel this hits the reader :Orly felt as if everything he had inside him, his heart and lungs and liver and kidneys and stomach, was slipping from his body, down his legs and onto the floor mat where he’d just dropped his IPad. After reading that line, I became enamored with the novel and glided to the satisfying poignant ending.
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Welcome to the elderly world of brothers Don Fidencio and Don Celestino. Sustaining through years of stubborn memory are so long ago fabled events that the brothers cannot come to an agreement of truth. At the center of their debate is the brothers' grandfather and a terrific century-old tale of kidnapping, murder, scalping, a ranch called El Rancho Capote, and a bear in a circus. The story is so fantastic, and each memory is so faulty, it has taken on a life of its own. So much so that Don Celestino's much younger paramour (and housekeeper), Soccoro, convinces the brothers to take a trip to Mexico to settle the debate once and for all. Soccoro and Don Celestino spirit Don Fidencio away from his nursing home without medications, identification, or money. The both heartwarming and heartbreaking problem is time is running out for both cantankerous men (Don Fidencio is over ninety). The moral of Amigoland is when you tell a story long enough it becomes fact, even if your memory is faulty.… (more)