The House of Broken Angels

(Little, Brown, $27) “Entering a party after it has begun is disorienting,” said in The Boston Globe. You won’t want to leave this one, though, because Luis Alberto Urrea’s fifth novel is built around an “immensely charming” Mexican-American patriarch whose children, siblings, and other family members “fan out around him like rays of sunshine.” Confined to a wheelchair and late to his own mother’s funeral on the opening page, Big Angel is clearly dying, but death proves no obstacle to the flow of the larger family tale, itself a river of competing individual stories. The rush of incident in the novel can be exhausting, said in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Urrea, who paints in neons rather than pastels, does not write for the emotionally faint of heart in need of personal space.” He winkingly acknowledges as much by having every member of the clan—Iraq War veteran Lalo, aloof scholar Little Angel, and tattooed drag queen Yndio included—climb into one bed at the end. Somehow this family is “always ready to move over and make room for one more.”