Synopses & Reviews
This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed -- or that they tried to forget. Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient.
With Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire Sáenz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.
Synopsis
Sentimental and ferocious, upsetting and tender, firmly magic-realist yet utterly modern. . . S enz is a writer with greatness in him. --San Diego Union Tribune
With Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire S enz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.
Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient.
This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed-- or that they tried to forget.
About the Author
Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in his grandmother's house in Old Picacho, New Mexico -- a farming village forty miles north of the border between Mexico and the United States. He is the author of Carry Me Like Water, In Perfect Light, Flowers for the Broken, House of Forgetting, and has also written several volumes of poetry and children's books. In addition to winning an American Book Award for his collection of poetry Calendar of Dust, he is also a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of a Lannan Poetry Fellowship. He teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.