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Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 920 MOR | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Author Notes
Pat Mora is a bilingual author with a special focus on children's literature. Among her awards are Honorary Doctorates from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo, Honorary Membership in the American Library Association, Life-Time Membership in USBBY, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship to write in Umbria, Italy, and a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Texas at El Paso. She was a recipient and judge of a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a recipient and advisor of the Kellogg National Leadership Fellowships.
Her children's books include: Water Rolls, Water Rises/El agua rueda, el agua sube. With her daughter, Libby Martinez, Pat also recently wrote I Pledge Allegiance and Bravo, Chico Canta! Bravo!. A literacy advocate, Pat founded Children's Day, Book Day, El día de los niños, El día de los libros often known as Día. The year-long commitment promotes creatively linking all children and families to books, and establishing annual April Children's Day, Book Day celebrations across the country. April 2016 will be Día's 20th Anniversary. Pat's Book Fiesta captures the Día spirit.
A former teacher, university administrator, museum director, and consultant, Pat is a popular national speaker who promotes creativity, inclusivity and bookjoy.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mora's poetic biography reads like fictionit is a cacophony of sound, a prism of light, a lattice of memories that is sometimes magical. It is a family portrait spilling over the framework of a house, "la casa de casas." Although the address given is 704 Mesita in El Paso, Texas, this dream house also represents the many homes and many countries (Spain, Mexico, the U.S.) of the family's history. Mora, the Chicana author of several books of poetry including Agua Santa: Holy Water, sifts through family papers and converses with her ancestors, and a bilingual guacamaya bird. Gardens permeate the prose and even the structure: Flowers produce riots of color in adobe courtyards and the chapters are organized by a gardener's calendar. One grandmother tells the author that "Gardens, like families, can be timelessif they're tended, Patricia." Sometimes memories make new histories, especially with so many voices contributing over prayers and candlesthe shapeshifting, trickster father; Mamá Cleta, a grandmother, earth mother, and keeper of the flowers; the one-armed aunt whose hand moves like butterflies in the kitchen; and the wonderful Aunt Lobo, who sweeps, loves children, but doesn't approve of men. At times, the web of family relationships seems too complex, as when the author lists strings of names bewildering to the reader, who has not yet been introduced. But, perhaps this merely reflects the messy business of life. This is a book the reader will need to sink into but the reward is a head full of indelible images, such as a scene at the turn of the century, in 1899, when the living, the dead and the not-yet-born raise their wineglasses to toast the future. (May) FYI: The book is due to be released on Cinco de Mayo. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A lyrical celebration of several generations of a Mexican- American family in El Paso, Tex., by a poet and essayist (Nepantla, not reviewed). Mora has created an ingenious structure for these recollections of her extended family, of their lives and the tales they share about the family's history. She imagines a family home, an ``adobe body to house the spirits I gather,'' a space ``through which generations move, each bringing its gifts, handing down languages and stories, recipes for living,'' and then populates it with several generations of family, living and dead: her austere grandparents; her loving, quarreling aunts; her quiet, beloved father; and her own bright, affectionate, independent children. The book's 12 chapters are devoted to different family members, who illuminate in the stories they tell Mora both their own lives and their relationship with the larger family. Indeed, it is the family as both the source of life and the one sure guarantee of a kind of immortality that figures most here. The stories are often of mundane matters: of vanished riches (the family settles in El Paso in 1913 after losing everything during the Mexican Revolution), of frustrated romances, and of course of the battles the family fights over several generations to preserve its identity in a new country. Woven in with these memories are recipes, fragments of songs and poetry, folk remedies, and jokes, all of the small matters that most reveal a family's identity. Several figures stand out, including Mora's maiden aunt Lobo, repelled by the idea of physical intimacy between men and women but fiercely protective of (and indulgent toward) the family's children. In a language deftly mingling the natural cadences of speech and precise, poetic imagery, Mora believably summons up both a group of tough, loving, idiosyncratic survivors and a vivid, detailed portrait of life in the southwest in this century. (12 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Booklist Review
Poet Mora's poignant family memoir begins with a gathering of ghosts around the kitchen table, an initially awkward narrative device that soon begins to make perfect sense. By visualizing her beloved dead--her sweet father, spirited mother, patient and loving grandmothers, uncles, and doting but eccentric aunts--Mora makes it clear that they continue to actively shape her life. Her complex and dramatic family history, however, comprises more than personal reminiscences: it also embraces resonant aspects of Mexican American history. Mora recounts her family's traumatic exodus from Mexico to escape the violence of Pancho Villa and his forces and their struggles to begin new lives in another country. To anchor her psychologically rich, dramatic, sometimes funny, often touching multigenerational tale, Mora uses the image of a house--the house of houses--during a single year, a fruitful metaphor that allows her to dwell on the bright beauty of flowers, birds, and trees, emblems of the loving legacy of her nurturing family. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
Poet Mora (Confetti, Lee & Low, 1996) has written the memoir of a Mexican American family in the form of voices of her ancestors living and dead. These 12 chapters, one for each month of the year, are deeply meaningful; each story, event, and name has a message about life, love, dependence, and memory. For example, we read of Mora's grandmother, the Mexican Cinderella, a red-haired orphan taken in by wealthy relatives; her mother, Estella, the extrovert; and her father, Raul, whom we meet on the first page when her Aunt Chole asks, "How can you still be hungry if you're dead?" The book contains photographs and genealogical charts to enhance the reader's perceptions and understanding of this work as a social and historical document. It is reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude as well as Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club but at times becomes disjointed and overschematic, treating the most fantastic happenings as if they were everyday occurrences. Still, this allegorical tale, filled with superstitions, remedies, and events, may be useful for academic libraries and necessary for Latin American literary collections.Susan Dearstyne, Hudson Valley Community Coll., Troy, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. xv |
| House of Houses Ut rosa flos florum, sic est domus ista domorum. As the rose is the flower of flowers, so is this, the house of houses | p. 1 |
| Enero friolero / Chilly January | p. 14 |
| Febrero loco / Crazy February | p. 44 |
| Marzo airoso / Windy March | p. 69 |
| Abril lluvioso / Rainy April | p. 99 |
| Mayo / May Enero friolero, febrero loco, marzo airoso, abril lluvioso, sacan a mayo, floreado y hermoso. Chilly January, crazy February, windy March, rainy April bring on the beauty of flowering May | p. 122 |
| Junio / June Huerta sin agua, cuerpo sin alma. An orchard without water is like a body without a soul | p. 145 |
| Julio / July Al que buen arbol se arrima, buena sombra le cobija. Seek shade under a worthy tree | p. 163 |
| Agosto / August Goza del mes de mayo que agosto llegara. Revel in May, for August soon arrives | p. 184 |
| Septiembre / September De lo hermoso, hermoso es el otono. To speak of lovely, speak of autumn | p. 211 |
| Octubre / October La que anda entre la miel, algo se le pega. Honey clings if you're surrounded by it | p. 233 |
| Noviembre / November La primavera se hace ligera, el invierno se hace eterno. Spring breezes by, while winter seems eternal | p. 253 |
| Diciembre, mes viejo que arruga el pellejo December, old month that wrinkles our skin | p. 272 |
| Dichos / Sayings | p. 292 |
