Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
One rainy night, deputy sheriff Mundo Morales of Amarga, Calif., sees a body floating down the river--the corpse of Attis McCurtain, Morales's childhood friend and Vietnam buddy. But hadn't Attis been confined to a mental institution after brutally murdering the love of his life? The mysteries of this first novel Choctaw- and Cherokee-descended Owens wrote Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel unfold in a familiar American literary landscape: a dusty, ``tight-strung little town'' riddled with sins, secrets and virulent racism against its Native American and Chicano inhabitants. But Amarga turns out to be more than the sum of its prejudices, betrayals and violent crimes. As in the fictional terrains of Garcia Marquez, the mythic and fantastic animate the town; spirits of the dead and nature watch over the living sometimes even offering advice, and these forces, rather than the mystery's solution, redeem the townspeople. Unfortunately, Owens's conceit is more interesting than his writing. His prose style is hard-boiled in the extreme, becoming particularly turgid whenever he introduces either female characters or sex. While the author's Native American characters are well drawn, most others who walk the streets of Amarga would be very much at home in a TV movie. This is the first book in Oklahoma's American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series. Mar.
Library Journal
Attis McCurtain is a mixed-blood Choctaw Indian whose return from Vietnam to his small California town initiates a chain of events involving self-discovery and the false divisions between this world and the spirit world. Mundo Morales, the Chicano cop who was Attis's best friend, and Hoey and Cole McCurtain, Attis's father and younger brother, all are forced to come to grips with who they are as mixed-blood people in modern America. At the same time they must try to solve the mystery of how Attis ended up dead in a river after his incarceration in a mental institution for the murder of his white girlfriend upon returning from Vietnam. Ghosts and Choctaw soul eaters move throughout this novel as matter-of-factly as do the living characters, assisting Cole with the search for his brother's missing body and Mundo with the search for Attis's murderer, while leading each man deeper into his own roots. A fine inaugural novel for an important new series from one of the premier publishers of works by and about Native Americans.-- Lisa A. Mitten, Univ. of Pittsburgh Lib.
Booknews
This mystery novel is the first volume of a new series featuring literary works--novels, short stories, criticism, and interpretations of tribal myths. Owens is of Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish descent. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
