Sky Over El Nido: Stories

"Sky Over El Nido, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, is a breath-taking first collection. Mayo's characters are by turns wise-ass and wistful, romantic and stringently realistic. They are each infused with the contradiction that is modern day Mexico, the setting for most of these stories, the contradiction between a lush and mysterious past and a present in which, as in the title story, prison inmates imagine that their guard 'has a closet full of women's shoes, all stolen. He subscribes to a foot-fetishist magazine which arrives more or less every other month in a plain brown wrapper.' Or a young boy wearing a T-shirt from Sea World that reads 'I heard Baby Shamu,' appears in a woman's hallucination in 'The Third Day.' In 'The Wedding,' a mother plans her daughter's nuptials in accordance with 'the Martha Stewart coffee table book,' and a grandmother worries about 'the high polyester content' of the dress she intends to wear. An art history student on a pilgrimage to a Mayan pyramid in 'O' describes the Mexico of C.M. Mayo's stories as 'Neptune, with televisions.' These stories are vibrant, strange, loaded with offbeat humor, exquisite detail, and delivered with near perfect pitch. Sky Over El Nidoshimmers with life." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)