Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Get on the road – literarily – with this novel!
2000s: Get on the road – literarily – with this novel!
While serving a sentence in a Mexican prison, Libertad González passes the time at the weekly Library Club, reading to her fellow inmates from whatever books she can find in the prison’s meager supply. With her stories, Libertad enthralls a group of female prisoners every bit as eccentric as the tales she tells.
But the story that emerges has nothing to do with the words printed on the pages. Instead, she tells the story of Joaquín González, a former professor and fugitive of the Mexican government who reinvents himself as a trucker in the United States. There he falls in love with a wild woman with whom he shares his truck and his life, until he unexpectedly finds himself alone on the road with a baby girl.
Mexicali
The character of this story is in a prison at the start of the novel and most of it takes place inside. There are flashbacks to her former life when she is with her trucker father as they travel across the USA.
Inside the prison, there’s a Library Book Club, where she “reads” classic works of literature to an ever-growing group of inmates. She is infact telling them her own story by reading others, filtering in details of her life through fictional stories. As well as the library, there is a beach in the prison – one of the characters breaks the rules and brings sand in to improve life, if only for a while.
Her father who became a truck driver in the U.S. was orignally a literature professor who ran from the Mexican government.
A story of stories within.
Destination : Mexicali, USA Author/Guide: Maria Amparo Escandon Departure Time: 2000s
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