![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jun. 3rd, 2011 10:59 amI have been waiting since 2009 for any news of Yxta Maya Murray's rumored new Lola Sanchez book to come out. (For those unfamiliar, the Lola Sanchez books have the spirit of the Indiana Jones franchise, except the protagonist is a Mexican-American bookstore-owning fantasy geek following in the footsteps of her reckless hotshot professor mom. They are EXACTLY AS DELIGHTFUL as one would expect.) The new one is supposed to be about Che Guevara using EXCALIBUR and it is likely to be a balm to my crack-loving soul, but I cannot find out anything about it! So finally in sorrow and desperation I went back and read one of her non-Lola Sanchez books, The Conquest.
The Conquest, pros:
1. The main plot centers around rare book preserver Sara Gonzalez's effort to prove that the book-within-a-book that she's working on is not an sensationalist sixteenth-century novel, but was in fact actually written by its cross-dressing lesbian juggling assassin Aztec princess protagonist, which ties in a lot of really fascinating questions about authorship and appropriation and the voices that survive!
2. DID I MENTION THE CROSS-DRESSING LESBIAN JUGGLING ASSASSIN AZTEC PRINCESS? (No seriously, her grand plan is to assassinate various people involved in the conquest of Mexico with the POWER OF JUGGLING. *___* Then she falls in love with a decadent intellectual nun and they have sex all over the nunnery.)
3. Okay, this is a relatively small detail, but there is a subplot about Sara's boss who secretly throws open the museum once a month for WILD HEDONISTIC HISTORIAN PARTIES where they unleash their wildest urges . . . to make out on all the antique furniture and fetishistically try on the carefully preserved historical outfits! This is so believable and hilarious to me.
The Conquest, cons:
1. I hate Sara's love story so, so much. She has this true and epic love with a marine who she's been dating since high school (and who appears to be the only connection outside her family that she's ever made), and the book begins at the point at which they have FINALLY broken up after ten years of having completely incompatible life goals, and he is engaged to someone else, and this entire part of the plot is her trying to convince him that their love is true and epic and he should ditch this other person and it made me incredibly annoyed at her every time it came up. Look, it's sad, but your life goals clearly are incompatible! You used your engagement ring money to buy a rare book! MOVE ON.
2. In a way, I wish this book did not have the serious goals that it clearly does. Because on the one hand, I very much sympathize and agree with Yxta Maya Murray's points, but on the other hand it makes the surreal, cracked-out, over-the-top, completely implausible as even trying for sixteenth-century writing of the book-within-a-book much more jarring. It's like if someone pulled out an Angela Carter short story and tried to pass it off as coming from the Renaissance. Yxta Maya Murray clearly just does not care and is not even trying, and maybe I shouldn't either, but . . . I do!
So in the end I am still really waiting for the next Lola Sanchez book, though the juggling assassin Aztec princess did do its part to tide me over.
The Conquest, pros:
1. The main plot centers around rare book preserver Sara Gonzalez's effort to prove that the book-within-a-book that she's working on is not an sensationalist sixteenth-century novel, but was in fact actually written by its cross-dressing lesbian juggling assassin Aztec princess protagonist, which ties in a lot of really fascinating questions about authorship and appropriation and the voices that survive!
2. DID I MENTION THE CROSS-DRESSING LESBIAN JUGGLING ASSASSIN AZTEC PRINCESS? (No seriously, her grand plan is to assassinate various people involved in the conquest of Mexico with the POWER OF JUGGLING. *___* Then she falls in love with a decadent intellectual nun and they have sex all over the nunnery.)
3. Okay, this is a relatively small detail, but there is a subplot about Sara's boss who secretly throws open the museum once a month for WILD HEDONISTIC HISTORIAN PARTIES where they unleash their wildest urges . . . to make out on all the antique furniture and fetishistically try on the carefully preserved historical outfits! This is so believable and hilarious to me.
The Conquest, cons:
1. I hate Sara's love story so, so much. She has this true and epic love with a marine who she's been dating since high school (and who appears to be the only connection outside her family that she's ever made), and the book begins at the point at which they have FINALLY broken up after ten years of having completely incompatible life goals, and he is engaged to someone else, and this entire part of the plot is her trying to convince him that their love is true and epic and he should ditch this other person and it made me incredibly annoyed at her every time it came up. Look, it's sad, but your life goals clearly are incompatible! You used your engagement ring money to buy a rare book! MOVE ON.
2. In a way, I wish this book did not have the serious goals that it clearly does. Because on the one hand, I very much sympathize and agree with Yxta Maya Murray's points, but on the other hand it makes the surreal, cracked-out, over-the-top, completely implausible as even trying for sixteenth-century writing of the book-within-a-book much more jarring. It's like if someone pulled out an Angela Carter short story and tried to pass it off as coming from the Renaissance. Yxta Maya Murray clearly just does not care and is not even trying, and maybe I shouldn't either, but . . . I do!
So in the end I am still really waiting for the next Lola Sanchez book, though the juggling assassin Aztec princess did do its part to tide me over.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
