L.A. Weather by María Amparo Escandón
Review of L.A. Weather by María Amparo Escandón
“In her perennial search for the best foods regardless of cuisine, exploring the vast cornucopia at her disposal, she’d realized that the little mom-and-pop restaurants in the mini-malls were where she found the mother lode of deliciousness. Why? Because immigrants operated them. They had brought their homeland’s flavors in their suitcases and were adding them to the never-ending gastronomic experiment that took place every day in Los Angeles. She loved to observe, but more important, to participate in the frequent overlap between different cuisines, resulting in an endless continuum of delight and surprise. Multiply that by more than one hundred and fifty countries and you had yourself Angeleno cuisine.”
I remember I was first drawn into this book because of its cover. I had found it on some list of best books to watch out for and I was scrolling through it rather mindlessly at the time, but I stopped when it came to this book because of the urgency depicted on its cover.
As you can see to the left, this is the cover it was published under in the United States, and it depicts a Los Angeles ravaged by the wildfires. In the era in which we’re all panicking about climate change and California is dealing with the brunt beginning impacts of our changing world, I found this topic to be quite fitting for the doomsday scenario we’re all living in right now. Although I am a fan of telenovas, I did not think this book was literally going to structure itself as one.
I haven’t read much Chicana literature that’s come out recently. I’ve read the older masters of the movement, like Cisneros, but I haven’t been able to get myself into the newer literature coming out.
Although, with some of the insanely talented Latino poets coming onto the scene nowadays, I am much more interested in the literature coming out of these diaspora groups. I myself am also becoming more interesting in Latin American cultures, so combining these forms of literature along with the academic work I’ve been reading about has been quite solid. Let’s begin this review.
In a burning Los Angeles, stormy weather rocks the privileged Alvarado family’s world.
The Alvarado family seems to have it all. Until they don’t, and our matriarch, Keila, is essentially sick of her husband’s shit. The father of the family Oscar has been obsessed with the weather a little too much, leaving no room for intimacy in their lives, and seems depressed and despondent at times. This has led to only one conclusion in Keila’s mind: they need to get divorced as soon as possible.
But when she breaks it to her three daughters, Claudia, Olivia, and Patricia, they vehemently object and tell their parents to try it for one year, despite Keila’s stark rejection to the concept of being stuck with Oscar for another year. Oscar, however, is holding a secret he never told anyone in the family: he owns an almond farm that’s being affected by the weather, which is why he has become so withdrawn.
This is also spurred on by the fact that while Keila was watching Olivia’s twin daughters, she left them unattended to and they almost drown in the half-cemented pool in the backyard. At a first glance, the lives of the three Alvarado daughters seem absolutely perfect. Claudia is a celebrity chef with her own cooking show, while her husband flies from coast to coast selling literary stories to movie studios.
Olivia is an architect and has two wonderful twin daughters, while Patricia is a jet-setting social media manager of your dreams. The Alvarado family comes from money, allowing all three of these girls to get the education and equipment they need to succeed in life, but they’re all also very miserable in their own unique ways.
Claudia ends up having a brain tumor halfway through the book and we find out through her family that her husband, Gabriel, has been cheating on her for awhile.
They then get divorced. Olivia’s husband isn’t exactly the greatest to her, but we see her classically blaming herself for his shitty behavior, and he wants to get rid of her embryos she has at a fertilization lab. They then get divorced in a pretty ugly way. Then Patricia has a weird fling but they’re married with a French guy named Eric, and then they get divorced after Patricia decides to implant herself with Olivia’s embryos.
In case you missed it earlier, this entire novel reads like a slightly whiny telenova. I didn’t care for any of these characters and couldn’t connect to them or their world—I think it was because of how rich and flighty they were. The privilege is very real with the Alvarado girls. We can, however, relate to their nanny Lola who comes to take care of Olivia’s twins. She calls out Olivia for house flipping in her neighborhood, pushing out the local immigrants, and then makes her promise to never do it again. Lola gets two thumbs up from me.
I think what this book was trying to get at was that underneath the superficial glamorous lives that people pretend to lead, they’re actually pretty miserable.
None of the three daughters have a successful relationship, and if we’re even at the point where Keila and Oscar are debating whether to get divorced or not, that’s a bad sign right there. We also get a blast of everything in this novel: lots of descriptions of sex, the random brain tumor that shows up halfway through that’s vaguely built up to this point, climate change, Patricia being raped as a teenager and having a queer son, the backdrop of family drama.
I did, however, enjoy the descriptions of food and culture that were sprinkled throughout the book. The matriarch of the family, Keila, is Mexican-Jewish and this did inspire me to do some research about the history of Jews in Mexico. We get some luscious, mouth-watering descriptions of food throughout the novel consistently.
The writing itself is also pretty good, but I found that if you can’t connect to these characters, you’re not going to care to continue. What kept me going personally was the fact that the plot was a train wreck in the making and I just couldn’t look away.
Overall Thoughts
I found this a difficult read because of how hard it is to connect to the characters, which I’ve mentioned several times. If you’re not used to dramatic television shows, too, then you’re probably going to be so confused at the sheer level of drama going on in this book.
Like we literally end the book on one last drama, which I won’t spoil, but that alone says a lot to me considering it starts with drama (the twins almost drowning and the divorce that Keila wants) and then it slowly escalates and gets worse from there. If you’re interested in L.A. culture or Latinos in L.A., you might find this book to be quite interesting, but all in all I recommend skipping this one or picking it up at your local library so you won’t have to pay for it.
