Loca
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed collection Drown meets Janet Mock’s Emmy-winning series Pose, “in this remarkable debut…capturing the heartbreak of queer youth, a woman’s rebellion against the confines of motherhood, and, above all, the pain and power of friendship” (Adam Haslett, bestselling author of Imagine Me Gone).
It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.
Loca follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heredia debuts with a potent narrative of two friends in the Bronx attempting to break free of the bonds, internal and external, that hold them back. Sal, a gay 25-year-old Dominican man, is excited by the prospect of a museum tour guide job. But after he receives a letter inviting him to come in for an interview ("a little American dream folded into an envelope"), he doubts his prospects and is too afraid to go. At a gay bar, Sal meets Vance and they fall in love. Eventually, he gets a job working with kids at a garden, but he's fired for kissing Vance there. Added to Sal's self-doubt and self-sabotage is the survivor's guilt he carries over the murder of his best friend Yadiel back in the Dominican Republic. A parallel narrative follows Sal's friend Charo, whose relationship with her baby daddy, Robert, hits the skids in part because she wants to spend more time with her queer friends. Eventually, she leaves Robert and their baby "to figure out who she is." The narrative lacks momentum in places, but Heredia credibly chronicles Sal's and Charo's pain as well as their pleasures, as they attempt to find their ways in the world. Readers will look forward to seeing what Heredia does next.
