Edgardo Vega Yunqué

Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York): October 2003

    This sweeping drama of intimately connected families --black, white,and Latino-- boldly conjures up the ever-shifting cultural mosaic that is America. At its heart is Vidamía Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who sets out in search of the father she has never known. Her journey takes her from the affluent home of her mother and stepfather to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her father Billy Farrell now lives in a fragile harmony with his second family. Once a gifted jazz pianist, Billy lost two fingers in the Vietnam War and thereafter shut himself off from jazz, tormented by guilt for having allowed his Marine buddy Joey to die.
    In this powerful modern odyssey, Vidamía struggles to bring her father back to the world of jazz. Her quest gives her a new understanding of family, particularly through her half-sisters Fawn, a lonely young poet plagued with a secret, and Cookie, a sassy,streetsmart homegirl who happens to be “white.” Vidamía’s affection for her new family troubles her mother, Elsa Santiago, who is disturbed by her own racial heritage. The estrangement between mother and daughter deepens as Vidamía becomes involved with a young African-American jazz saxophonist who provokes an awareness of her own complex roots, along with the dizzying contradictions and permutations of racial identity etched in the American psyche.
    Vega Yunqué vividly captures the myriad voices of our American idiom like a virtuoso spinning out a series of expanding riffs, by turns lyrical, deadly, flippant, witty, and haunting.

    Edgardo Vega Yunqué, author of The Comeback, Mendoza’s Dreams, Casualty Report, and The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle, was born in Puerto Rico and lives in Brooklyn. His stories have been adapted for the stage and anthologized internationally.

Publication rights: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York
Dramatic rights: Thomas Colchie, New York