Mohr, Nicholosa | Paul Heins
PAUL HEINS
[El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories is a] group of short narratives about Puerto Rican immigrants living in the South Bronx between 1946 and 1956. Despite their poverty and their crowded quarters, the people are generally represented as dwelling in an alien rather than in a hostile environment; and each story is a carefully focused vignette of pathetic and/or comic incidents…. Only in the novella, "Herman and Alice," does the author introduce topics of hard-core realism: the homosexual Herman befriends and marries Alice, a teenage pregnant girl. The style is plain and direct, often making use of colloquial Americanisms, and the occasional Spanish expressions are effectively dramatic. At their best, the short Chekov-like narratives reveal universal emotions hovering beneath an urban, ethnic casing. (p. 57)
Paul Heins, in The Horn Book Magazine (copyright © 1976 by the Horn Book, Inc., Boston), February,...
[The entire page is 157 words long]
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