The Amado Women\t

Debut novelist Zamorano's family drama purports to offer alternatives to Latina stereotypes, but winds up relying on shallow characterizations and easy targets. The three Amado sisters couldn't be more different: career-driven Celeste has been focused solely on money and investments ever since she suffered a tragedy years before; perfect wife and mother Sylvia secretly suffers physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her non-Latino husband; and Nataly, the baby sister, struggles to make ends meet as an artist and waitress. As the sisters rally around a crisis affecting Sylvia's family, individual and family secrets are dredged up, including a feud between Nataly and Celeste and a long-buried sorrow from their mother Mercy's past. The narration proceeds somewhat jerkily between past and present and among the women's points of view. There is little character development here, and characters' motivations are frequently unclear and their behaviors unexplained. Most troubling, however, is that this novel supposedly valorizing girl power does so at the expense of all of the male characters, who are, to a man, cruel, unfaithful, duplicitous, or all three. (July)