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MEMOIR WEEK: TAKE THIS MAN by Brando Skyhorse

 

It's Memoir Week here at The Latina Book Club.  Do let us know which memoirs/biographies you would add to our list. Happy Reading.
 

Simon & Schuster
"At least it's never boring." --Mami's favorite saying
 
Brando Skyhorse's memoir is at times funny, poignant and simply outrageous. Imagine growing up thinking you are an American Indian -- Mami's good intentions aside! -- and  then learning that your whole life was a lie, that you are really a Mexican.  TAKE THIS MAN is Skyhorse's search for his true identity and his real father.
BOOK SUMMARY:   When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his Mexican father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live his life as a Mexican just because he started out as one. The life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the American Indian son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin.
Through a series of letters to Paul Skyhorse Johnson, a stranger in prison for armed robbery, Maria reinvents herself and her young son as American Indians in the colorful Mexican-American neighborhood of Echo Park, California. There Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be over thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth of his own past, when a surprise discovery online leads him to his biological father at last.#

To read The Latina Book Club's review of THE MADONNAS OF ECHO PARK, click here.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, THE MADONNAS OF ECHO PARK, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The book was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. He has been awarded fellowships at Ucross and Can Serrat, Spain. Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine. He is the 2014 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-In-Washington at George Washington University. Visit him at www.brandoskyhorse.com.




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