For years, Arana shuttled easily between her father's aristocratic Peruvian family and her mother's American family. Only when she immigrated to the United States as an adolescent did she come to understand that her cultural identity was split in half. She was a hybrid Hispanic American: "a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica."

“An engaging family history, the book also offers an extraordinarily candid portrait of her parents’ unconventional marriage. She turns it into a metaphor for a joining of North and South America.”

The Christian Science Monitor

“The top rank of memoir...ARANA’S writing skills elevate the book to outright lyricism in chapter after chapter.”

The Denver Post

“Reads like a collaboration between JOHN CHEEVER and ISABEL ALLENDE…the reader can’t put this memoir down.”

The New York Times Book Review

"Lush, mystical ... a memoir that blends family historia and the puzzling deadly politics of Peru."—USA Today

"American Chica is a fascinating blend of autobiography and soap opera, memoir and meditation. ... full of larger-than-life characters and stranger-than-fiction situations. ... delightful."—Washington Post

"Arana's intimate and intelligent memoir captures exactly the pulse of a changing America. ...[C]learly demonstrates her ability to write crystalline prose and make erudite cultural observations."—Library Journal

"Part history, part family memoir ... American Chica reads like a collaboration between John Cheever and Isabel Allende.... One of the many reasons the reader can't put this memoir down is the author's impressive command of her craft.... Arana has left her own imprint on her material, while at the same time displaying virtuosity in the storyteller's traditional gifts: spareness, clarity, and a passion for allegory."—The New York Times Book Review

A South American man, a North American woman—hoping against hope, throwing a frail span over the divide, trying to bolt beams into sand. There was one large lesson my parents had yet to learn as they strode into the garden with friends, hungry for rum and fried blood: There is a fundamental rift between North and South America, a flaw so deep it is tectonic. The plates don't fit. The earth is loose. A fault runs through. Earthquakes happen. Walls are likely to fall.

—from American Chica

From the Hardcover edition.

In her father’s Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother’s American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken’s neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who “was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica.”

Here are two vastly different landscapes: Peru—earthquake-prone, charged with ghosts of history and mythology—and the sprawling prairie lands of Wyoming. In these rich terrains resides a colorful cast of family members who bring Arana’s historia to life...her proud grandfather who one day simply stopped coming down the stairs; her dazzling grandmother, “clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage.” But most important are Arana’s parents: he a brilliant engineer, she a gifted musician. For more than half a century these two passionate, strong-willed people struggled to overcome the bicultural tensions in their marriage and, finally, to prevail.

Marie Arana is the editor of The Washington Post Book World and has done feature writing for The Post. She has served on the board of directors of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in Washington, D.C.