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    En el Tiempo de la Luz: Una Novela
    En el Tiempo de la Luz: Una Novela
    En el Tiempo de la Luz: Una Novela
    Ebook431 pages7 hours

    En el Tiempo de la Luz: Una Novela

    By Benjamin Alire Sáenz

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “Ben Saenz’s vivid imagination captures all that is beautiful, agonizing and redemptive in the crossings we make through borders of geography and culture. But it is in the interior journeys of the psyche and the soul that we must find salvation; Saenz’s brilliant prose penetrates to that core and he finds and exposes that truth. A reader can ask for no more than this: to be spellbound by a story, and to come to the last page with a sense of having been being changed and allowed to carry something of it away.” —Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country

    From award-winning poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz comes a haunting novel depicting the cruelties of cultural displacement and the resilience of those who are left in its aftermath.

    In Perfect Light is the story of two strong-willed people who are forever altered by a single tragedy. After Andés Segovia's parents are killed in a car accident when he is still a young boy, his older brother decides to steal the family away to Juárez, Mexico. That decision, made with the best intentions, sets into motion the unraveling of an American family.

    Years later, his family destroyed, Andés is left to make sense of the chaos—but he is ill-equipped to make sense of his life. He begins a dark journey toward self-destruction, his talent and brilliance brought down by the weight of a burden too frightening and maddening to bear alone. The manifestation of this frustration is a singular rage that finds an outlet in a dark and seedy El Paso bar—leading him improbably to Grace Delgado.

    Recently confronted with her own sense of isolation and mortality, Grace is an unlikely angel, a therapist who agrees to treat Andés after he is arrested in the United States. The two are suspicious of each other, yet they slowly arrive at a tentative working relationship that allows each of them to examine his and her own fragile and damaged past. 

    With the urgent, unflinching vision of a true storyteller and the precise, arresting language of a poet, Sáenz's In Perfect Light bears witness to the cruelty of circumstance and, more than offering escape, the novel offers the possibility of salvation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061763717
    En el Tiempo de la Luz: Una Novela
    Author

    Benjamin Alire Sáenz

    Benjamin Alire Sáenz is an author of poetry and prose for adults and teens. He was the first Hispanic winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and a recipient of the American Book Award for his books for adults. He is the author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which was a Printz Honor Book, the Stonewall Award winner, the Pura Belpré Award winner, the Lambda Literary Award winner, and a finalist for the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award, and its sequel, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World. His first novel for teens, Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood, was an ALA Top Ten Book for Young Adults and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book for teens, He Forgot to Say Goodbye, won the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award, the Southwest Book Award, and was named a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. He lives in El Paso, Texas.

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Parole Officer Grace meets the "effects" of the life of Andres Segovia.I read this again from Page 8 to savor the words and the world created.More followed with 'pitch-perfect' dialogue between Dave and Andres.
    • 5/5
      This is a book that needs to be read at least twice. The first time through I am so caught up by the pain of Andres' life that I cannot appreciate the imagery of light. Yet I can see that image there, coming up again and again, and can tell that the author has carefully crafted it's presence. So I will need to read again, to focus more on that beautiful development.It was a book I had to keep putting down, because there was only so much I could take of the thoughts of this woman with cancer, this mother and son estranged from each other despite their great love, this angry young man who lost his parents and was pimped as a child. Yet it was a book I had to keep picking up because the writing was so powerful, the people so engaging.

    Book preview

    En el Tiempo de la Luz - Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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