El Niño

June 19, 2017
The second novel in Bozak’s Border trilogy, following Orphan Love, is challenging but worthwhile for readers who are up to following its three narrators through shifting timelines. It’s set in a fictional desert landscape near the U.S.-Mexico border at a time when a wall is being built to keep unwanted migrants out of the U.S. Honey, a wealthy woman, drives south from her home in Buzzard City for an impromptu visit with her elderly mother, Marianne, a painter who lives with her Shepherd-coyote dog, Baez, in a rundown trailer where she sometimes helps boys trying to cross the nearby border. When Honey arrives, she discovers Marianne is missing. Honey meets Chavez, a young “coyote” or human trafficker, who claims to know the whereabouts of her mother, and offers to pay him to guide her to Marianne. Thus begins a parched journey through the desert heat and into the stories of Chavez, his friend Juan, and those desperate to immigrate. Narration alternates among Honey, Chavez, and Baez. Stark imagery (some of it gruesome and shocking) and abrupt time shifts impart a surrealist feeling to this provocative novel as Bozak transports readers into the brutal world of human smuggling. Agent: Martha Webb, McDermid Agency.

July 1, 2016
In the parched desert that is the U.S.-Mexico border, even human beings are reduced to a shell of their former selves. It is no wonder that the bounty hunters and the undocumented migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. tag one of the central figures in Bozak's evocative novel El Esqueleto, the skeleton. Honey has just discovered that her mother, Marianne, a do-gooder, is missing, and sets out to find her, tracking across the desiccated landscape where even their souls are drained of spirit. Into this central predicament, Bozak interweaves the story of Chavez, a young coyote, or trafficker, who agrees to help Honey search for Marianne for a price, along with that of Baez, Marianne's coyote-dog hybrid, whose animal voice adds a raw perspective. Chavez's struggles as a severely underpaid farmhand form a moving and politically resonant subplot. Even as the pace, at times, slows down to a stupor as befits the desert setting, this is a finely wrought novel in which Bozak uses nuanced writing and powerfully descriptive prose to make today's headlines come alive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)