Family Album

This is a collection of three stunning, ethereal novellas. Karen, the adolescent protagonist in "The Talisman," is doing poorly in Catholic boarding school. Every time she attempts to memorize facts, people from her past burst into her imagination: her mother, Natalia, often appears and begs Karen to understand Mark, Natalia's boyfriend; sometimes Mark arrives smelling like alcohol and tells Karen stories which require him to feel her body; always her friends, Missouri and Nicolasa, come to comfort and advise. In the title story, anecdotes about Ximena's Nicaraguan family are told through memory, conversation and descriptions of often-faceless photographs. Ximena, a middle-class woman living in Paris, wants to understand the relationship of her own comfortable French life to the tortured existence of her relatives in Samoza's Nicaragua. "Village of God and the Devil" is the story of the magic village of Deya, where ghosts are as real as memory and imagination. Written in deceptively simple and imaginative prose, Family Album is a dynamic blend of the natural and supernatural.