Growing Through the Ugly

Growing Through the Ugly begins: This is my first day of being dead but I want to return to my abuelita''s house. Even though the protagonist Buzzy Digit a child-turned-soldier is dead his memory is still alive. In lyrical colorful and haunting prose drawing on elements of magic realism we are transported to the 1960s town of El Paso Texas where we relive Buzzy''s memories of his life with his extended family on the border between Mexico and America. The border where people speak two languages. Abandoned first by his father then by his mother and growing up in an erotically charged household filled with cousins aunts and uncles Buzzy''s world is defined by loss loneliness and sexual confusion. Eventually Buzzy falls in love with his destructive cousin Red and finds that his only escape from the claustrophobia of home is what might make him a heroor kill him: the war in Vietnam.