María Amparo Escandón doesn't stop at writing novels, she's also written screenplays and is a film producer. She's known for writing stories in the Latino community, focusing on family, loss, forgiveness, and self-discovery. Her most recent novel, L.A. Weather, falls right into that category and was chosen as the 2022 International Latino Book Award Winner for Fiction and the Reese's Book Club pick for September 2021. It deals with cancer, infertility, infidelity, rape and sexual assault, medical content, grief, pregnancy, classism, threats of deportation, and allusions to domestic abuse. There is nothing particularly graphic, it glosses over most of these things quickly.
The year is 2016 and this book will cover from January to December, with each chapter covering a month, of a year that will be unforgettable for the Alvarado family. It starts with a very traumatic event that leads to the matriarch of the family, Keila, announcing that she intends to divorce her husband, Oscar. In her defense, all Oscar does is watch the weather channel and stare into the sky hoping for rain. By the end of the year, all three of the Alvarado children, Claudia, Olivia, and Patricia, have gone through some major life changes and made some very dubious choices but the family as a whole has come together in a cohesive way they haven't seen since they were children.
I'm going to spoil some stuff here so skip this chapter if you plan on reading, but I just don't understand how one family can go through so much in a single year, so I'm going to list it out. The very first thing that happens is that the twin toddler daughters of Olivia drown in their grandparents pool but, miraculously after being submerged for twenty minutes, are able to be resuscitated with no clear adverse effects. That happens immediately. It's followed by Keila's divorce announcement, her cheating on Oscar, Claudia having a severe brain tumor and needing surgery, her divorce from her cheating husband who was more worried about what happened to Claudia's assets in the event of her death than of her surgery and recovery, Olivia going through a tumultuous divorce and stealing two frozen embryos that were legally set to be destroyed, Patricia also getting divorced, and throwing a party with her soon to be ex-husband to announce the divorce. Her ex-husband that suggests that maybe a threesome is what they really need to fix their sham of a marriage. Patricia implanting said stolen embryos into her own body and becoming pregnant with twins, which she plans to "sister-parent" with Olivia. Patricia's older son comes out as non-binary, and Oscar finally tells everyone that he used all of the family's money to buy and maintain an almond orchard which is now failing and they will have to move quickly to avoid filing for bankruptcy and losing everything. In one year.
Normally, I really like a book that has multiple points of view, but I was not a fan of this one. Each of the Alvarado parents and their three daughters show up as narrators in this novel, yet I could not connect to any of them. Some of them I really, actively disliked and had trouble listening to. My biggest takeaway from this book was that this family needs to establish some healthy boundaries, which does not seem likely to happen since the book ends with both Alvarado parents, their three daughters, and their three grandchildren, one dog, and one cat, all living together under the same roof with two more grandchildren on the way. Not only did I find the sheer number of catastrophic events in this book statistically unlikely, but the pace was excruciating. For a book that spans a year in three hundred thirty pages, it felt like it moved so slowly and I wasn't sure it would ever end.
I'm giving L.A. Weather by María Amparo Escandón 2.5 stars out of 5. There was nothing technically wrong with this book, the writing was decent, there was a plot that played out, no alarmingly large holes in the story, but I did not like it and likely won't be reading any more of her books.
For more from the author, check out their website at https://www.mariaescandon.com/
Pairs well with chilaquiles and an all out, no holds barred, Easter egg hunt. But again, I also think some boundaries would really benefit everyone.
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