College of the Redwoods names ‘The Madonnas of Echo Park’ Book of the Year

College of the Redwoods is proud to announce The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse as its 2018/19 Book of the Year.

The novel received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The book was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick.

The Madonnas of Echo Park is both a grand mural of a Los Angeles neighborhood and an intimate glimpse into the lives of the men and women who struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream. Each chapter summons a different voice: poetic, fierce, comic. We meet Hector, a day-laborer who trolls the streets for work and witnesses a murder that pits his morality against his illegal status; his ex-wife Felicia, who narrowly survives a shooting and lands a cleaning job in a Hollywood Hills house as desolate as its owner; and young Aurora, who journeys through her now gentrified childhood neighborhood to discover her own history and her place in the land that all Mexican-Americans dream of, “the land that belongs to us again.”

 The CR Book of the Year committee will be promoting the book in fall semester 2018, with events to be announced.

The college is also offering an online, late-start, one-unit Book of the Year discussion class, Reading 10 beginning Saturday, August 18.

To register for Reading 10, visit http://www.redwoods.edu/admissions/  or email Ambassador@redwoods.edu.

And to learn more about the Book of the Year program, visit https://www.redwoods.edu/events/bookoftheyear or contact the committee chair, David Holper at 707-476-4370 or david-holper@redwoods.edu

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