The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

In a series of ten interconnected stories, Manuel Muñoz illuminates the lives of several Mexican-American families in the same neighborhood in Central California. The title story comes last in the collection, and is perhaps the most poignant. Twenty-one-year-old Emilio works the graveyard shift in a paper mill. One night, after a few shots of whiskey and a few hits of marijuana, he goes back to the forklift to move a pallet of paper, loses control and drops the whole load on himself. He is crippled for life, living at home with his father, who is at the end of his rope with caring for him. He puts Emilio in the car and drives him to a faith healer in Fresno. After giving her his life savings, she gives Emilio a tiny baby food jar of cream and tells him to rub it on his legs. "He watched as his father smoothed the crema onto his thin legs... not being thrifty with it as they had been with everything else in life, rubbing hard with belief..."

In these stories, sometimes belief is all there is: belief that a better job will come, that the loved one will return love, that a surly teenager headed for trouble will straighten out, that a gay son will change--faith and hope are staples of these people's lives. For the most part, they are disappointed. Most of the stories are of single mothers or fathers trying to raise families under the shadow of immigration and language problems and too little money. The subtext of many of the stories is homosexuality, not a lifestyle embraced by the Mexican-American community.

Muñoz writes with a sure hand of the way these people cross paths in unpredictable ways, in situations where there is never enough love or forgiveness. These are hard stories, sad and beautiful in their truth and clarity. --Valerie Ryan