Madewell Brown

March 9, 2009
In this wheezy, melancholy tale, Collignon returns to the fictional New Mexico town of Guadalupe (from his previous novel, Perdido
), this time by way of a young woman named Rachael. Rachael grew up an orphan in South Cairo, Ill., and carries on a grudging yet loving connection with an elderly man named Obie, who tells her about her grandfather (and his childhood friend), Madewell Brown. When Obie dies, he leaves her his memoirs of his and Madewell's glory days on an African-American baseball team. Meanwhile, in Guadalupe, an elderly man tells his son, Cipriano, about a long-ago desert encounter with a strange black man. Cipriano later finds the man's bag—emblazoned with the name Madewell Brown—stashed in the shed and pulls from it an unsent letter, addressed to Obie, which he drops in the mail. From there, the two stories begin to converge to sketch out Madewell's story, punctuated by Obie's too-nostalgic remembrances of baseball games past. It's decent enough, but there's nothing especially memorable about it.

April 15, 2009
In his fourth novel in an acclaimed series that includes "The Journal of Antonio Montoya, Perdido", and "A Santo in the Image of Cristobel Garcia", Collignon returns to the fictional town of Guadalupe, NM, and continues the strange mystery of Madewell Brown, who arrived in Guadalupe one day in the 1950s, lived there quietly for seven years, and abruptly left. A bag with his name on it has been gathering dust in Ruffino Trujillo's garden shed until Ruffino's son Cipriano discovers it and unpacks a photo of a Negro League baseball team and a stamped envelope addressed to Obie Poole of Cairo, IL. Retired baseball player Obie has passed away, and the letter lands in the hands of his friend and caretaker, Rachael, who believes that Madewell is her grandfather. Obie's narrated flashbacks fill in the details as Rachael and Cipriano begin parallel quests to uncover the truth about Madewell's life and death and their ties to events kept hidden for decades. Straightforward prose and well-drawn characters, married to fragmented memories of racism and violence, make for a compelling tale. Think Tony Hillerman with a dash of Cormac McCarthy.Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast Lib.

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