Fruit of the Drunken Tree: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of August 2018: While this autobiographically-inspired novel vividly summons the turmoil of 1990s Colombia, it’s more a story of private intimacies than national history. Nine-year-old Chula Santiago becomes obsessed with her family’s new housekeeper, Petrona, a 13-year-old of few words who lives far from Chula’s comfortable neighborhood. Chapters told from Petrona’s perspective offer a glimpse into a mirror-world of Bogotá where breakfast varies based on what soda she pours over stale bread for her many siblings. What starts as a lyrical domestic portrait turns increasingly tense as we’re forced to chart the collision course between two sweetnesses in Petrona’s life: her first boyfriend, and her growing closeness to the Santiago family. The civil war underway shimmers menacingly within the perspectives of both narrators: there’s an assassination, a car bombing at a mall, and of course the infamous Escobar manhunt that breathes a narco-haze over the country. There’s magical realism here, but it’s not García Márquez’s; it vines up from the distortions introduced by childhood: the naiveté, overheard adult conversations, the wildness of unsupervised outdoor play during the apagones (electricity rationing), and the lead blanket of first promises. --Katy Ball