Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. Sammy & Juliana in Hollywood

Of course, a book can be dark and grim and still be good. It's my (entirely subjective) sense that adults deal better with good sad books than teenagers do--which is why I wonder if it should have been marketed as an adult book instead--but this is one of those books.

Sammy Santos is 17 in 1968, in the barrio called Hollywood, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. This is the story, more a set of vignettes than a novel, of him and his friends: school politics, the Vietnam war, love, drugs, sex, hoping for something better than life in the barrio.

More than anything it is a book about loss. One by one, people die, they go away to war, they move away, until Sammy's left surrounded by ghosts. The Juliana of the title, Sammy's first love, is the first to go, and while she only shows up in the first 50 pages, her presence--or her absence--haunts the rest of the book: because Juliana is gone, because Sammy loved her, the whole book becomes about losing the people who you love.

But it's not so grim as all that. There's room in here for joy and hope, real moments of happiness, and one gets the sense that Sammy is decent, and sane, and as happy as he can be in the midst of poverty. The certainty that he's going to college (even if it's state school, even if he has to go to work at 4:30 in the morning to save up for it) gives some hope and sense of an open destiny to him, and to me.

The narrative voice is so vivid that I hear the book spoken with a Spanish accent. The book is liberally sprinkled with Spanish, often untranslated; I know enough Spanish to get everything but the cursing, and that much can be picked up from context, but I don't know how it would hit someone who couldn't speak the language (even to my meager level). I also like that the period atmosphere is woven in naturally, so that this isn't a book about the sixties, but a book about people who live in a specific era--but who are first and foremost people.

It's such a sad book. Too many people die in it. But that doesn't make me any less glad that I read it.