The Lucky Ones

Starred review from January 16, 2017
Pachico’s history-bound debut novel is a carefully yet fiercely composed collage of voices that bears witness to the executions, forced disappearances, and other atrocities that took place in Colombia from 1993 to 2013 during the country’s violent civil war. The book provides a searing glimpse into the conflict through 11 interconnected short stories—each focusing on a different aspect of the struggle. The novel’s riveting first installment, “Lucky,” takes place in 2003 and sets an ominous tone. In it, a young girl is holed up inside her family’s mansion while they’re away for the weekend. What she doesn’t know—but begins to suspect as she hears a knock at the door—is that they’re never coming back. In “Lemon Pie,” one of the strongest vignettes in the book, an American former middle school teacher has been held captive by the FARC for “five years, eight months, two weeks, and five days.” When not locked in a shed, he passes the time via sessions of “Parasite Squishing” and by delivering lectures from memory on Hamlet and The Scarlet Letter to his class of twigs, leaves, and trees in the Amazonian jungle. The most unique story is “Junkie Rabbit,” a twisted glimpse into a rabbit warren filled with bunnies subsisting on the last remnants of coca plants from a ransacked estate. Having lived in Colombia until she turned 18, Pachico has a firsthand connection to the country’s charms and troubles that shines through on every gripping page.

Starred review from January 1, 2017
Set during the bloody height of the Colombian conflict and spanning more than two decades, Pachico's unforgettable whirlwind of a debut centers around the intersecting lives of a group of wealthy schoolgirls as well as the parents, teachers, and housekeepers who move in their orbit.It's 2003, and Stephanie Lansky's parents have taken off for the holiday weekend to attend a lavish party in the mountains of Cali, leaving 17-year-old Stephanie--she herself has declined the invitation--under the care of their beloved housekeeper. But one day in, and Stephanie finds the housekeeper gone, the phone lines dead, and a man with a thickly scarred face buzzing ceaselessly at the door. Now it's 2008, and Stephanie's former eighth-grade teacher, held captive in the Colombian jungle, spends his days teaching the finer points of Hamlet to a class of leaves and sticks, parasites burrowing into his arms. In Cali, a class of third graders dutifully writes condolence cards to the parents of a classmate, blown up over the mountains. In New York City, a Colombian expat has reinvented herself as an American fashion student, dealing drugs to Williamsburg hipsters and Upper West Side college boys, each tiny bag of powder carrying a remnant of the past she can't seem to escape. A little girl grows up with a pet lion in a house so opulent there's an indoor fishpond; a young man writes articles about the links between the government and the death squadrons and has his fingers axed off by masked men with machetes. Taken alone--and some have been published as such--the chapters work as complete short stories, full worlds as vibrant and jarring as fever dreams. But together, they form something much larger, revealing a complicated and morally ambiguous web of interconnecting lives. Unsettling and pulsing with life; a brilliantly surreal portrait of life amid destabilizing violence.

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February 15, 2017
Pachico's volatile debut draws on her experience growing up in Cali, Colombia, an area fraught with paramilitary violence. Each chapter functions like a self-contained short story, capturing the sociopolitical unrest and its impact on various, intertwined lives. The tale opens in Valle del Cauca in 2003, after teenager Stephanie Lansky decides to skip a holiday getaway with her parents, and things at home turn wildly awry as her housekeeper disappears and a strange man lurks around her front gate. The scene shifts to the Amazon jungle in 2008, where an abducted schoolteacher named Mr. B struggles to save his sanity by teaching Shakespeare to a class of sticks, leaves, and rocks as a wound on his hand quickly worsens. A subsequent chapter is set in New York, where a young Colombian woman has turned to dealing drugs, unable to fully escape the vortex of her home country's turbulence. Occasionally disorienting and relentlessly rewarding, with traces of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping (1997), Pachico's unapologetically immersive first novel brings life to a South American struggle often forgotten in global headlines.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2016

Colombia-born, England-based debut author Pachico intensively limns her homeland's longtime violence by crisscrossing the lives of numerous characters. Among them: a teenager hiding in her family's mansion and her kidnapped teacher, who ends up in the jungle teaching guerrillas the fine points of Shakespeare. Particularly relevant as Colombia looks to end the fighting. Excerpted in The New Yorker.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2017

Set mostly in Colombia between 1993 and 2013 during the periods of guerrilla warfare and infamous drug trade, this work focuses primarily on the lives of a small group of privileged girls attending a private school. Though promoted as a novel, it is really a thematically linked collection whose episodic, fragmented structure reads more like a series of short stories. Since the protagonists are somewhat similar, individual character development is subsumed to that of an ensemble cast. Often, a minor character in an earlier episode reappears in a major role in a later one in a temporal shift that may catch readers off guard. For example, Betsy, barely mentioned early on, has moved to Washington, DC, where she is living with an escaped prisoner in the last chapter 20 years later. VERDICT By using a cross spectrum of various character types from different walks of life--rebels, teachers, adolescent girls, parents--Pachico, raised in Colombia and now living in the United Kingdom, re-creates this recently violent period of Colombian history, but her debut novel is a disjointed kaleidoscope that fails in integrating all the various components. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.