Overview
In this engrossing coming-of-age novel set in the 1950s, eighteen-year-old Val leaves his tiny West Texas town to search for the father he thought had died a hero's death years earlier. This quest gives Val a convenient excuse for getting out, as he is being forced into a loveless marriage and meaningless existence in a town where his life has been made more difficult because his mother is Mexican. The young man's search draws him into a mysterious world: violent and unpredictable, yet also glamorous and seductive. It is his Anglo father's world of high-stakes professional gambling. With their ultimate confrontation taking place in Reno, Nevada, Val finally realizes that all that glitters in his father's free-wheeling lifestyle is more grit than gold and that true style comes only with the acceptance of personal responsibility. Yet Val's father, Cooper, will leave him with a priceless gift. Val develops a new-found pride in his Mexican heritage, as well as the courage to follow his dream.Editorials
School Library Journal
Gr 9 UpAt first glance, this novel is yet another male coming-of-age story. What sets it apart from the pack is that the hero, Valentin Cooper, is of Mexican-American heritage and his story takes place in the 1950s. Val, 18, lives in a small town in West Texas. He leaves his Mexican mother, Anglo stepfather, and pregnant girlfriend to find his father, a "nickel-plated bastard" say some, who had supposedly died a hero years before. Val's footloose quest takes him to a meeting with his father and his companion, a Reno prostitute and wanna-be singer, Blue Morgan, in an El Paso hotel. From there, Val, Frank, and Blue go on to Tahoe and then to Reno for the "big game" of high-stakes poker and a final confrontation between father and son. Val realizes that he can only be a man when he, unlike Frank, takes full responsibility for his actions. The novel's only shortcoming is a tendency for the author's prose and characterization to slide into clich. After all, isn't the hooker with a heart of gold who seems to be "one of those lost souls who can love only men who mistreat them" someone who turns up just a bit too often?David A. Lindsey, Lakewood High and Middle School Libraries, WAKirkus Reviews
A Mexican-American teenager comes to terms with his melting- pot heritage—in a labored and predictable picaresque tale from the author of The Dark Side of the Dream (1995).Having turned 18 and graduated from high school in 1955, Valentín Cooper is eager to break out of Big Bend, the West Texas whistle stop where he grew up. A film buff who hopes to make some kind of a living in Hollywood, he feels hemmed in by his loving but demanding mother Guadalupe (who owns a roadside cafe frequented by local farmers and long-haul truckers) and a pregnant Anglo girlfriend named Bonnie Gortner. Before leaving town, Val learns that the Anglo father he had been told died a hero's death before his birth is not only alive and well but an itinerant gambler who works the western US. Using information reluctantly furnished by a local lawyer, the vaguely aggrieved man-child catches up with his errant parent in El Paso. Frank Cooper proves a charming if stubbornly independent individual willing to accord his long-lost son no more than partner status. Since Frank hopes to amass the bankroll that he needs to qualify for a potentially lucrative poker game in Reno, the two tour the Sunbelt's gaming outposts. At length, there's enough money to buy Frank a seat at the card table and (unsurprisingly) give him a chance to betray his offspring's trust. At the close, Val (wise enough to appreciate that he has more than broken even on his high-stakes wager of emotion and time) spurns his deadbeat dad's appeal to join forces with him and hops a bus for Big Bend, though he'll leave again—this time for California.
Self-indulgent period fiction that does little to evoke the postWW II/Korean Conflict era, let alone prove that "the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."