Lotería by Mario Alberto Zombrano

Published by HarperCollins on July 2, 2013

Luz Maria Castillo is eleven. She's been in a government facility for a few days with only a deck of Lotería cards from home. Her sister Estrella is hospitalized, in critical condition. Luz feels responsible for Estrella's injury but its cause remains a mystery through most of the novel. Luz refuses to speak. Her aunt Tencha wants her to talk to the counselors, to open up, because that's the only way to get her father out of jail. Luz' counselor interprets Luz' silence as a reaction to trauma. Instead of speaking, Luz follows Tencha's suggestion to write down her thoughts. She writes as if she were speaking to God.

In her journal, Luz tells a series of stories about her life, memories of her past, each inspired by the picture on a Lotería card. Whether all of the stories are literally true is unclear; Luz reminds us that we each tell our own stories in our own ways. Some of the stories are cute but seemingly pointless (that's to be expected when random memories are triggered by pictures) while others bring Luz' life into sharper focus. To an extent, her story is typical of an immigrant family transplanted from Mexico to the United States, struggling to assimilate and coping with discrimination. On a more personal level, Luz describes parents whose domestic life transitioned from romance to violence, a father whose rough discipline leaves its mark on both of his daughters and a mother who (in Luz' view) abandoned them. Mario Zombrano makes it possible to understand and even empathize with Luz' father while, in the same moment, condemning his abusive behavior.

It's also easy to understand Luz, a girl who doesn't understand herself. She questions her role in her family as well as her identity: Is she Mexican or American? Is she good or bad? Does she have religious faith or has that, like so much else in her life, been lost? Luz is young but she will clearly spend many years trying to define herself. While I wasn't always convinced that the narrative voice was that of an eleven-year-old, I was usually too absorbed by the story to wonder at the maturity of its narrator.

Luz' stories come together in a powerful but touching narrative as she weaves her way, card by card, to Estrella's injury and her father's incarceration. While the mood is somber, Zombrano occasionally lightens the tone with playful sentences. This is one of my favorites: "I took guitar lessons for a year but quit because my teacher smelled like tomato soup."

There is a certain amount of untranslated Spanish in the book. Some readers won't like that. If you don't speak the language, you might want to have your laptop open to a translation website while you read. The extra effort is rewarding.

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