Shooting Down Heaven
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- $169.00
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- $169.00
Descripción editorial
The children of Colombia's drug lords face a rude awakening in a "supremely well-crafted" novel by one of "the best Latin American writers at work today" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
After twelve years away, Larry comes home to Colombia when his father, an old associate of Pablo Escobar, is murdered. Larry plans to collect his father's remains and give him a proper burial . . . but his childhood friend Pedro has other plans. Picking him up at the airport, Pedro takes him directly to the Alborada celebration in Medellín—where Larry's long-awaited homecoming takes an increasingly grim turn.
The years of luxury living in bodyguard-surrounded mansions are over. Larry watches his family—including his ex-beauty queen mother and troubled brother—fall deeper into depression, drug addiction, and the traps of the family business. Now Larry must confront his family's turbulent history while protecting himself from the dark remnants of a lost and struggling city. Unflinching and remarkably controlled, Jorge Franco's Shooting Down Heaven is a stunning portrait of a generation wounded by their parents' mistakes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the heart of Franco's uneven latest (after Paradise Travel) is the family of Libardo, a Colombian cartel capo and former associate of Pablo Escobar. The book begins 12 years after Libardo's disappearance and is primarily narrated by his son, Larry, who has been living in London and has returned to Medell n to give his father a proper burial after his remains were discovered in a mass grave. The book proceeds to tell just how Libardo ended up there and the impact of his disappearance on the family. Franco banks on the long game, scripting his story like a serial telenovela, with digressive subplots including a quasi-romance between Larry and an airline passenger and a heavy dependency on cliffhangers. While it takes a while for these threads to coalesce, patient readers will be rewarded with some rich character development, particularly in Larry's mother, Fernanda, a former beauty queen and embittered matriarch. While the focus on Fernanda enlivens the book in the latter half, helped no doubt by Rosenberg's spunky translation, the appearance of vampires, an absurd death by psychedelic-induced mishap, and an eye-rolling Sleepless in Seattle like ending don't help. Franco's entry into the growing pantheon of cartel dramas might look better on TV.
