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The Brightest Prose
A Review by Eleanor Henderson

Henríquez, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, presents a stunning debut collection of eight stories and a novella, all of which take place in Panama. Unlike so many stories set in an exotic locale, which tend to read like fictionalized guidebooks, these bring the country to life with fluency and verve, its sights and sounds observed from the thoughtful distance of a writer removed by a generation (Henríquez was born in Delaware, her father in Panama). Whether from the point of view of a university student living on the beach in El Rompío, or a young woman selling appliances in Panama City, or an American wife visiting the Gamboa rain forest, the stories never fail to delight with cultural detail: "pineapples hanging from columns of rope"; the time when "the panaderías start their lonely business of rolling dough in the early half-light of morning." More importantly, the stories lend fresh insight to human circumstances that transcend setting -- girls growing up without fathers, teenagers discovering the heartbreak of first love. In the opening trio ("Yanina," "Ashes," "Drive") we encounter more than one "seriously fucked chica" -- young, headstrong, seriously likable women navigating quietly desperate lives, women who would be at home with the characters of Junot Díaz.

But the collection has surprises in store. In "Mercury" and "The Wide Pale Ocean," two extraordinary girls come of age and come to terms with the burden of being a daughter. In the wonderfully anomalous fable "The Box House and the Snow," a girl known as "the daughter" enacts this burden by holding up the snow-soaked roof of her father's house. And in the book's greatest marvel, the breathtaking novella "Come Together, Fall Apart," fifteen-year-old Ramón is unable to support this weight, as he watches his father's roof collapse along with his country. Here, in his diary of the weeks surrounding Noriega's capture in 1989, history bursts onto the page: "Near the beginning of it all a homemade bomb exploded near my Tía Reina's car while she was stopped at a red light. It landed on the sedan next to her and spit out like a firecracker, tearing through the passenger side of her Toyota, crumbs of the fiery metal burning tiny holes through her skirt." Henríquez's stories have the same impact, searing with a brightness that is hard to forget.