Come Together, Fall Apart

December 12, 2005
The characters in this eloquent, muted debut collection of eight stories plus the title novella are eager to enjoy life, though thwarted by the inimical conditions of a Panama in transition after the collapse of Noriega's rule. The young couple in the first story, "Yanina," embody a sweetly turbulent and conflicted relationship: the title character, wounded by the marital infidelity of her father and later of her godfather, asks her well-meaning but still uncertain boyfriend, René, to marry her 45 times. "Ashes," which first appeared in The New Yorker
, tracks the unraveling effects of a mother's death on her daughter, Mireya, already adrift in troubled relationships and endangered by her arduous job as a meat cutter. Characters reel from family rupture and dysfunction: the teenaged Maria in "Mercury," for example, is torn between her home in New Jersey, where her parents are divorcing, and Panama City, where she is sent to visit aging grandparents she wants desperately to impress with her Spanish. The eponymous final novella, set in late 1989 on the eve of the American invasion of Panama, affectingly reveals a country "teetering on the edge of a cliff" through the fate of a family forced to leave their ancestral Panama City home.

April 15, 2006
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Henrí quez offers a tender collection of short stories and a novella set in Panama around the time of the military leader Noriega's fall. The writing is pleasantly engaging but far from trite; throughout, the characters confront significant life issues like marriage, coming of age, independence, divorce, job tedium, drug addiction, and incest while struggling with political upheaval, generational conflict, and personal ambitions and desires. Through vividly evoked landscapes, neighborhoods, and families, Henrí quez reveals the consequences of a mother's death ( -Ashes -), a father's infidelity ( -Come Together, Fall Apart -), or a couple's divorce ( -Mercury -). The poignancy of many of these stories is intense, especially that of the title novella. Recommended for all collections." -Sofia A. Tangalos, SUNY at Buffalo"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2006
In eight short stories and a novella, newcomer Henriuez creates a vision of Panama that is at once sweepingly realistic and subtly hallucinogenic. Water imagery abounds, and like water, these tales are transparent yet weighty, buoyant yet crushing. Henriquez evokes a scruffy landscape and a shabby Panama City where the heat is debilitating, life is precarious, and relationships are skewed. Fathers are absent, dangerous, or depressed. Young women scramble to hold on to crummy jobs and unreliable lovers. People have trouble expressing their feelings, and political unrest is driving everyone crazy. In the ravishing title novella, a family faces eviction while Noriega is under siege, and the country braces for an American invasion that promises to be both military and corporate. It is left to young boys and girls to try to hold their households together--literally, in one surreal tale. Losses great and small are common currency, and yet these fluid stories abound in beauty, irony, and magic. Like Junot Diaz and Daniel Alarcon, Henriquez is an immensely gifted young writer who evokes the spirit of a struggling land and the people who love it beyond reason.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)