Maria Amparo Escandón

Fiction 2021 | 319 pages

I stuck with it but didn't much enjoy LA Weather.  The relationships in this close-knit family moved so slowly and were quite depressing.  Oscar and Keila are the parents, and their three grown daughters are Olivia, Claudia, and Patricia.  We travel for a year (each chapter is one month) through the lives of this Mexican family in Los Angeles.  From the start, Oscar is obviously withdrawn, in pain, depressed.  The family does Sunday dinner together and spends all the holidays together and claims to be so close, and yet it takes half the book (half of a year) for someone to ask Oscar why he is so depressed.  The story line includes numerous medical crises, and multiple marriages fall apart. The characters were surface. I kept plowing through, but started to track the number of pages to the end.  What a disappointment after Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Company, which I so enjoyed and still remember bits of, even though I read it in 2006.  (It was our library read that year, and LA Weather is one of four library community reads in 2023).  I really would like to give this three hearts and suggest you try it on for size, but I would be unfaithful to my rating system, and will stick with two hearts.  I don’t recommend it.

February 2023