Thursday, May 1, 2014

Lotería Review


Title:  Lotería
Author:  Mario Alberto Zambrano
Publisher:  HarperCollins
Copyright:  2013
ISBN:  978-0-06-226854-9
EPUB ISBN:  978-0-06-226854-9
Format:  EPUB

 "'What did you do all together?  What did you do with your Papi?"  But she wouldn't get it.  She wouldn't know what it was like.  We all fought.  We all hit each other."

Such is the normality  of family life for Luz, the eleven-year-old narrator of Lotería.  Through her eyes, Mario Alberto Zambrano tells a story of growing up in Mexico and the United States, of family struggles, and of the love and loyalty that holds families through tough times.

Zambrano, a former contemporary ballet dancer and graduate of The New School and Iowa Writers' Workshop, debuts his writing with this powerful novel, drawing upon his own experiences growing up and playing Lotería as a child.  He explains the rules of the popular game, after which the novel is titled, in a brief prologue.  It shares many similarities with bingo, but Lotería relies on cards rather than numbers, and each card comes with a riddle. 

The novel is structured around those cards, and weaves itself in beautifully subtle riddles through the voice of Luz.  Each chapter begins with the picture of a card, and each card sparks a flashback as Luz struggles to work through the trauma of her childhood.  The story is non-linear to a degree, as if Zambrano shuffled the deck, but each story flows into the next and each piece of the puzzle builds the story Luz is trying to tell.  As a result, the chapters vary widely in length, but the pace keeps moving.

Zambrano does an excellent job of dealing with childhood trauma tenderly, yet realistically.  Luz is the perfect narrator because she is imperfect.  She is a child dealing with adult situations, and Zambrano balances these sides of her character well, mixing childlike naiveté with a gritty vocabulary and the maturity forced upon her.  Her descriptions flow from her youthful perspective, for example when describing her father’s alcoholism, she says, “It was coming from that man in the bottle, Don Pedro.  He’d get inside Papi’s head and shake him until he turned into someone else.”  Zambrano uses images to explain things rather than resorting to the way adults say things.  When describing her father drunk, she says, “that’s how he moved, like if he were on a boat in the middle of an ocean.”

Luz brings an energetic, bright voice to a tragic story.  She can find beauty in even the darkest of times, and must as she grapples with her past.  She has a colorful vocabulary for an eleven year old, at one point getting in trouble for calling her sister a “smart-ass,” and at another saying that another character “didn’t have the balls to explain how wrong she was.”  Yet, as she tells the story of growing up in Mexico and then the United States, her vocabulary doesn’t seem out of place at all.  Luz also reverts to Spanish during emotional highs or lows, intensifying the experience and highlighting it in the music of another language.  The bilingualism neither gets in the way of the narrative nor makes the book difficult to read.

Much of the story revolves around the relationship between Luz and her father.  She is quite open about the fact that he sometimes beat her and frequently got drunk and smashed up the house.  Yet she still loves him and always manages to find his humanity.  In one scene, he takes Luz into the other room to punish her for swearing.  Then he looks at Luz and opens his hand.  “He pulled his arm back and lifted his eyebrows and slapped the belt against his hand as hard as he could, and I let out a yelp to make it seem as though he were hitting me.”  She is doggedly loyal to her Papi, and despite the tragedy she experiences and her occasionally fiery temper, she finds humanity in everyone.


Lotería is a personal, gritty, yet lyrical story that brings an emotional intensity in its examination of tragedy and trauma.  The complex, realistic characters come to life through the eyes and suppressed memories of the young narrator as she works through her past and searches for redemption, for herself and her family.