The Brothers Torres

The Picnic Basket: The Brothers Torres • YA fiction
Voorhees, Coert. The Brothers Torres. Hyperion Books for Children, 2008, 316 pages.

Coert Voorhees’s first novel set in small-town New Mexico is an enthralling delight to read. Fast-paced, real and immediate, its characters face present day high school concerns—family, friendships, race, class, ownership, romance, and violence—with honesty and wry humor. Although I found it irritating in the first couple of chapters, the manner in which the first-person narrator, Frankie Towers, habitually separates from himself to observe himself is astonishingly well-done, imitating the self-consciousness of adolescent experience; within a few chapters I was hooked, with no desire to set down the book. His longings and desires contrast against the reality of his situation—where he’s the “good son” working at the family restaurant while his athletically-gifted older brother with college scholarship in hand is given the latitude to run wild (while his parents believe he’s studying or practicing football). Towers’ torn loyalties, desire to gain social status, longing to date the beautiful Rebecca, and sense of personal inadequacy in the company of football heroes and the bad cholos. Heritage—Spanish, white or Native American—is vitally important to the characters and yet easily joked about among friends. The Spanish language terms peppering the text add credibility and the many English translations easily woven into the story allow readers unfamiliar with Spanish to understand, and to learn bits of a rising language in the English-speaking USA.

This tale, authentically told, yet able to cross into the consciousness of diverse readers, earns a Picnic Basket rating of 5 from me. It will easily breach the cultural divides of the United States to bring YA readers of all cultures to a better understanding of the pressures of being a young, Latino-American male in the Southwest. The Brothers Torres is the dessert of a well-rounded picnic. Provide it as a free-choice title for grades 8 and nine; consider studying it as part of a literature course for grades 10 and above.

Watch for Voorhees’ name, as he is destined to be a rising star in the world of YA Latino-American literature.

Picnic Basket: 5

I look forward to reading this novel again.

Cynthia Winfield