Marie Arana is the editor of The Washington Post Book World and has done feature writing for The Post. She has
served on the board of directors of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Book Critics
Circle. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Review
�The top rank of memoir...ARANA�S writing skills elevate the book to outright lyricism in chapter after chapter.�
--The Denver Post
�Reads like a collaboration between JOHN CHEEVER and ISABEL ALLENDE�the reader can�t put this memoir down.�
--The New York Times Book Review
�An engaging family history, the book also offers an extraordinarily candid portrait of her parents� unconventional
marriage. She turns it into a metaphor for a joining of North and South America.�
--The Christian Science Monitor
Random House.com Publishing website, August, 2002
Summary
In her father�s Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother�s American family
she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken�s neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between
these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did
she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms
with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who �was a north-south
collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica.�
Here are two vastly different landscapes: Peru�earthquake-prone, charged with ghosts of history and mythology�and
the sprawling prairie lands of Wyoming. In these rich terrains resides a colorful cast of family members who bring
Arana�s historia to life...her proud grandfather who one day simply stopped coming down the stairs; her dazzling
grandmother, �clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage.� But most important are Arana�s
parents: he a brilliant engineer, she a gifted musician. For more than half a century these two passionate, strong-willed
people struggled to overcome the bicultural tensions in their marriage and, finally, to prevail.
