Zigzag Way

Beautifully written with some of the most vivid descriptions of modern Mexico I have read. Maintains interest, but the plot goes into extensive development of certain characters only to abandon them. And the ending was less than satisfying. Yet a deeply talented writer worthy of the read.

Eric O'Brien is an uncertain and awkward young man, a would-be writer and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend Em to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload and gradually seduced by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world and its celebrations of the Dia de los Muertos. He finds himself in a curious quest for his own family in a ghost mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth. Until Pancho Villa and revolution came to Mexico. A recording of this novel is available from BBC Audiobooks and Eleanor Bron's reading is truly breathtaking. Highly recommended.

My reading has declined by 75% this past year for the lack of finding books like this one. I learned more about Mexico in 160 pages than in 4 visits there. The author has an incredible ability to focus with lightning pace on both the thrust of plot and smallest details, but never through use of excess words. We start in an East Coast college where a young guy follows his scientist girl friend to Mexico and as they separate for her to do her work, the young man goes deeper into the mountains of Mexico and almost loses himself in the history he trudges up in the pursuit of the story of his Mexican grandfather. Many readers will say, Oh Yuck! and ignore books like this, turning to another James Petterson re-hash. Too bad, but that's freedom.