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Lotería: A Novel
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HarperCollins 2013
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In this literary debut, a young girl tells of her traumatic life via a Mexican card game in a "heart-wrenching tale of violence, love and a broken family" (Los Angeles Times).
With her older sister Estrella in the ICU and her father in jail, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo has been taken into the custody of the state. Alone in her room, she retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through her beloved deck of lotería cards, a Latin American game of chance . Each of the cards' colorful images—mermaids, bottles, spiders, death, and stars—sparks a random memory.
Pieced together, these snapshots bring into focus the joy and pain of the young girl's life, and the events that led to her present situation. But just as the story becomes clear, a breathtaking twist changes everything.
By turns affecting and inspiring, Lotería is a powerful novel that reminds us of the importance of remembering, even when we are trying to forget.
Beautiful images of lotería cards are featured throughout this intricate and haunting novel.
"A taut, fraught, look at tragedy, its aftermath, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive." —Justin Torres, National Book award-winning author of Blackouts
"Sheer genius." —Booklist, starred review
"Loteria . . . captures, from a wide-eyed yet uncloying child's perspective, the way in which life can feel a lot like a game of chance." —Vogue
"Like the novels of Cortazar, its form is intricate and beautiful." —Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love
"An intriguing debut and an elegiac, miniature entry in the literature of Latin American diaspora that will break your heart." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
07/02/2013
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780062268563
ASIN:
B009R4IW5U

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APA Citation (style guide)

Mario Alberto Zambrano. (2013). Lotería: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Mario Alberto Zambrano. 2013. Lotería: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Mario Alberto Zambrano, Lotería: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2013.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Mario Alberto Zambrano. Lotería: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2013.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.

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        Mario Alberto Zambrano published his debut novel Lotería in 2013 with Harper. He's the recipient of a Presidential Scholar Award, Princess Grace Award, NEA Fellowship in Literature, Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, along with multiple residencies across the globe including Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, England. He has served as Lecturer in Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University and is currently the Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School.

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fullDescription
In this literary debut, a young girl tells of her traumatic life via a Mexican card game in a "heart-wrenching tale of violence, love and a broken family" (Los Angeles Times).
With her older sister Estrella in the ICU and her father in jail, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo has been taken into the custody of the state. Alone in her room, she retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through her beloved deck of lotería cards, a Latin American game of chance . Each of the cards' colorful images—mermaids, bottles, spiders, death, and stars—sparks a random memory.
Pieced together, these snapshots bring into focus the joy and pain of the young girl's life, and the events that led to her present situation. But just as the story becomes clear, a breathtaking twist changes everything.
By turns affecting and inspiring, Lotería is a powerful novel that reminds us of the importance of remembering, even when we are trying to forget.
Beautiful images of lotería cards are featured throughout this intricate and haunting novel.
"A taut, fraught, look at tragedy, its aftermath, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive." —Justin Torres, National Book award-winning author of Blackouts
"Sheer genius." —Booklist, starred review
"Loteria . . . captures, from a wide-eyed yet uncloying child's perspective, the way in which life can feel a lot like a game of chance." —Vogue
"Like the novels of Cortazar, its form is intricate and beautiful." —Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love
"An intriguing debut and an elegiac, miniature entry in the literature of Latin American diaspora that will break your heart." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Los Angeles Times, Summer Reading Pick
      • content:

        "Sometimes what Zambrano leaves off the page is just as important as what's been written. This narrative sleight of hand shows Zambrano's gift for evoking great pain in stark, lyrical sketches." — Los Angeles Times, Summer Reading Pick

        "Loteria is a taut, fraught, look at tragedy, its aftermath, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. With suspense, dread, and always the possibility for redemption, we watch as Zambrano flips the cards of chance and fate." — Justin Torres, author of We The Animals

        "Loteria...captures, from a wide-eyed yet uncloying child's perspective, the way in which life can feel a lot like a game of chance." — Vogue, "Summer Reads"

        "A polished tome of prose unreeling the tale of plucky little Luz Maria Castillo in the game of chance called life.... We peer like voyeurs, artfully led by Zambrano's pacing, dialogue and comically drawn characters." — Houston Chronicle

        "Loteria... is constructed as a beautiful, gripping, and lyrical set of riddles (asked and solved) about life—and—death matters in one family. Like the novels of Cortazar, its form is intricate and beautiful. " — Charles Baxter, author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories and The Feast of Love

        "Mario Alberto Zambrano performs a lyrical and formal sleight of hand conjuring a spiritually profound and deeply moving story. Loteria is about everything that matters. . . . This gorgeous, one-of-a-kind debut, marks the emergence of a singular and powerful new literary voice." — Amber Dermont, New York Times bestselling author of The Starboard Sea and Damage Control: Stories

        "In a bold, deeply-felt debut Mario Alberto Zambrano brings us tragedy made powerful ... These are people who hold on to each other so hard it hurts. And this moving novel will hug you too, every bit as tight." — Josh Weil, author of The New Valley

        "Take the architecture of Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies and marry it to the wide-open childhood receptivity of Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, and you might achieve something like the effect of Loteria, but the tone Mario Alberto Zambrano strikes here is entirely his own. Luz, the book's young narrator, is at once rueful and playful, innocent and canny, with the true breath of life about her, and when she finally lays the last of her cards before you, you'll feel that you know her as well as you do your own family." — Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead

        "If a book can be a spirit, this one is lithe, beautiful, and true. Mario Alberto Zambrano brings the heart of an artist immersed in movement and music to his prose and the result is dazzling." — Ru Freeman, author of A Disobedient Girl

        "Loteria, charms on every page, despite heartache, love and loss. . . . The beauty and joy of her voice overcomes the hardships of her life, and by the end we have fallen in love. Bravo to a marvelous debut!" — Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli

        "Mario Alberto Zambrano's Loteria is a tender, beautifully written story. In every line, Zambrano finds the happy and sad music of childhood. It is an entrancing work." — Lynne Tillman, author of Someday This Will Be Funny

        "Lotería is the card-based Mexican variant of bingo and, in the hands of Zambrano, it's a deck stacked with narrative possibilities. . . . An intriguing debut and an elegiac, miniature entry in the literature of Latin American...

      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from April 29, 2013
        Lotería is the card-based Mexican variant of bingo and, in the hands of Zambrano, it’s a deck stacked with narrative possibilities. Following her mother’s disappearance and the arrest of her father, 11-year-old Luz María Castillo dwells in the netherworld between state custody and return to Mexico, which her family left before she was born. But Luz is no stranger to in-between states, and, rendered mute by trauma, she addresses her history to God using the Lotería cards that are her sole possession. What follows are 53 chapters, each corresponding to a pictograph—beginning with “La Araña” (the spider) and ending with “La Rana” (the frog). The accompanying sketches assemble Luz’s fractious family life in equally jagged fragments, some tender as “La Dama” (the lady), others deadly as “El Alacán” (the scorpion). The two central figures in Luz’s recollections are her Papí, a tortured alcoholic who terrorizes his family, and her older sister Estrella, who pays a steep price for defying her father. And yet Luz’s strongest memories are of the Mexican border town where she vacations, mariachi music, fireworks, and the roses in her yard. From these, Zambrano coaxes a language that straddles pictures and words, Spanish and English. An intriguing debut and an elegiac, miniature entry in the literature of Latin American diaspora that will break your heart. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        February 1, 2013

        Here's perhaps the big-news debut of this group, with a 75,000-copy first printing and a nice publicity push. Former professional ballet dancer Zambrano (e.g., Nederlands Dans Theater) has protagonist Luz Castillo use loteria, the Mexican version of bingo, to tell the story of her life. With her father in jail and her sister hospitalized, 11-year-old Luz is in state custody and refusing to speak. But as she writes in her journal, she sifts through the vivid loteria cards (featuring mermaids, stars, and spiders, for instance) and uses them for inspiration. A very good bet.

        Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        March 15, 2013
        A young Mexican-American girl recounts the heartbreaking dissolution of her entire family. This debut novel from former professional ballet dancer Zambrano, written from the point of view of a tween girl who has inadvertently become a ward of the state, smacks a bit of experimental fiction, largely due to its deliberate construction. It is a journal written by 11-year-old Luz Castillo, who refuses to speak to others. Instead, she shuffles and reshuffles a deck of Loteria cards, a Latin American game of chance featuring 54 macabre representations of various objects or animals. With each flip of the card, Luz reveals some little memory, painstakingly rendered, about her family. It's a slowly told tale delivered in short, ambiguous chapters. "I'm not a piece of news in the Chronicle she can just pick up and read," Luz complains. "It's not like that, not black and white. If anything it's like a telenovela with a ranchera in the background playing so loud you can't even hear your thoughts anymore." Over time, Luz reveals the story of her deeply dysfunctional family--the mother that abandons her children and her Papi who drinks heavily and flies into such a rage over a sexual indiscretion that he breaks Luz's arm. And then there is Estrella, Luz's motherly older sister who lies at death's door in the ICU of a local hospital, her fate even more uncertain than her little sister's. The broken tale and imaginative first-person narration lend weight to this curious novel. It's an impressive first step for an artist exploring a new medium. A contemplative yet discordant collection of stories about where life's scars originate.

        COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from June 1, 2013
        Zambrano's stellar debut is proof positive that good things come in small packages. Here the good thingdare we say, the very good thing?is the journal/memoir of 11-year-old Luz Castillo, who has been taken into the state's custody after her father is arrested. Luz's mother has disappeared, and older sister Estrella lies dying in a hospital. Luz, whom some might label a willful child, steadfastly refuses to speak to anyone, least of all her counselor; instead, the child has opted to share her thoughts with God via written entries inspired by the pictures in a deck of Loter-a cards. Zambrano's selection of the Mexican bingo-like game cards as Luz's communication vehicle is sheer genius. Not only is it the girl's favorite game because it calls up happier times, but also because the images, including a tree, a rooster, and death, spur her imagination, unearthing events that otherwise might become forever suppressed. A nonjudgmental observer of her dysfunctional environment, Luz is trying to construct her own moral compass. Although this spare, little illustrated book may seem better suited to young adult readers, rest assured that Luz's story will engage both young and old right up to, and beyond, the startling plot twist.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        May 15, 2013

        Loteria, a kind of Mexican bingo played with 54 pictures instead of numbers, is used by 11-year-old Luz Castillo to frame the journal she is writing. Refusing to speak to the authorities who have her in custody, the rather mature Luz confides her feelings and life story, ostensibly to God, as she associates each loteria image with a thought or event. The drum, for example, morphs into a beating she suffered from her abusive, alcoholic father, who slammed her hand into the wall and permanently deformed her arm. Gradually we learn why Luz is in custody and also about the accidental shooting and subsequent death of her sister, the disappearance of her mother, and her eventual healing. VERDICT Despite some forced connections, first novelist Zambrano's modified epistolary narration works well. Ultimately, though, the dysfunctional nature of Luz's family leaves a bad taste in the reader's mouth; these are not people whom one wants to know. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/13.]--Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

        Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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In this literary debut, a young girl tells of her traumatic life via a Mexican card game in a "heart-wrenching tale of violence, love and a broken family" (Los Angeles Times).
With her older sister Estrella in the ICU and her father in jail, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo has been taken into the custody of the state. Alone in her room, she retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through her beloved deck of lotería cards, a Latin American game of chance . Each of the cards' colorful images—mermaids, bottles, spiders, death, and stars—sparks a random memory.
Pieced together, these snapshots bring into focus the joy and pain of the young girl's life, and the events that led to her present situation. But just as the story becomes clear, a breathtaking twist changes everything.
By turns affecting and inspiring, Lotería is a powerful novel that reminds us of the importance of remembering, even when we are trying to...
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