Loving Pedro Infante: A Novel

325 pp. Winner of the American Book Award. An exuberant novel about a lovelorn woman obsessed with the Mexican film star Pedro Infante. Teresina ("Tere") vila is a divorced, thirty-something Chicana working "in the hinterlands of life" in Cabritoville, New Mexico, a small dusty town near El Paso, Texas. The love of her life is Lucio, a smooth-talking ne'er-do-well who will never leave his wife and ties Tere's heart in knots with a string of empty promises. Her diversions are few but intense, and center around her best friend, Irma, and her membership in the Pedro Infante Fan Club #256. "If you're Méjicana or Méjicano and don't know who Pedro Infante is, you should be tied to a hot stove with yucca rope and beaten with sharp dry corn husks as you stand in a vat of soggy fideos." If you're a gringo, think of him as a Mexican Elvis, a one-time carpenter whose career in song and on screen in such memorable movies as Nosotros los Pobres, Ustedes los Ricos, and Pepe, el Toro, propelled him to the heights of fame until he was killed after a plane he piloted crashed on April 15, 1957. Hilarious and heartrending, Loving Pedro Infante is about the fictions we weave to justify loving the wrong mate.