Cigarette smoke, fragrant bougainvillea, and Santa Ana winds drift from its pages. It transports you to L.A., long-ago. Braverman describes a bizarre landscape exploding with violence; suddenly you realize she is describing Saturday-morning cartoons.

Anyone who grew up poor on the outside, but privledged on the inside will appreciate this book. Jordan is having a wreck of a childhood no thanks to star-struck LA adults, her father's cancer, vapid neighborhood children, her McCarthy minded guidance counselor, and her mother's relentless insecurities. As a result, she cultivates a righteous arrogance that will give courage to anyone under the age of twenty. While 60s flower-power culture doesn't seem like it would have been my chosen escape from the insanity, I can understand how the amazing cultural power of youth at the time set up an inevitable backlash on the youth of today. This is my favorite Braverman book - the most potent, the most troubling. There is a reason that this book is out of print!!

Maybe I expected it to be better, but I found parts of this book a chore to wade through.

I appreciate that in real life people do go over and over the same scenes in their head, but it felt like Braverman had simply cut and pasted paragraphs from one chapter to another.

I guess I'm not the kind of reader who enjoys rereading sections for their lyricism, so I felt like I was being forced to do so against my will.

Hard to complain because it is so much better than most of the stuff I have read lately. That being said, I'd recommend Mark of an Angel, Virgin Suicides, and Ice Storm prior to this.

Perhaps if you are a drug addict with a cancerous gambler for a Dad, you will find that this is a perfect snapshot of your life and a motivating force. But for someone on the outside looking in, it's simply a very well written book about these people that repeats itself just a couple times more than I would have liked.

I've read this book and have taken its significance personally.
However, the lyricism stands above that of male authors who
originally capitalized on the trend to glorify, explain and
identify with abuse of cocaine.
And it isn't that simple. I commend Kate Braverman for not taking a simplified polemic view of "rehabilitation." Writing something versed in poetry and greek tradition draws out the tragedy much more poignantly than anything else I've ever read.
The language employed in this novel elevates it to art. And I just can't say that about contemporaneous works on the same subject written by male authors.
So Reprint, Reprint, Reprint, and realize that other women of my generation might deign to listen to a genuine, artistic, beautiful rendition of something with which they may identify.
Sincerely,
Lydia Hazen

This book is tremendous, and I agree with the other review: Get This Book Back Into Print! Braverman began as a poet, and you can see it in her own unique style. After reading her incredible prose, you'll understand why she has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The story is about a woman heavily addicted to cocaine, whose dad is heavily into gambling ("the horses") and is also afflicted with cancer. It's about the woman's struggle to get away from both the white powder as well as from the bad men who've helped her get addicted. You will not read better-crafted prose than this novel...

i am in an architecture program and i used this book to inspire a school project for housing. i was totally engrossed in the book.

Kate Braverman sees connections and shows them to us -- "She can outwait them. Any woman could. Women have waited millions of years, growing seperate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend." -- like this one. A LUSH story.

I first came across Ms. Braverman through a serendipitous reading of her Squandering the Blue. Palm Latitudes is an extraordinary work which traces the rooted infrastructure of three women's lives, each one a hybrid creation of the industrial village of Los Angeles, each one a cantadora of resonant flesh and spirit. To read Braverman's poetic masterpiece is to experience literary alchemy. I keep the novel at my bedside, as I have done for the past five years, and am repeatedly renewed by its presence. This is an masterful author to cherish; this is a work to sustain you through life's many quickenings and passages.

Braverman creates a fantastic, hallucinogenic landscape to represent Kahlo's vision as she creates her voice giving details of her life through her death bed first person narrative. The book explores the ideas behind what is truth when subjective perception filters the world differently for each individual, and Braverman succeeds well in representing Kahlo's point of view.

The book falls very short though in accurately representing Kahlo's life as it was. Biographical details are ignored and one begins to wonder what exactly Braverman's mission is. Kahlo's dedication to communism is twisted to have her describing key communist leaders like Trotsky as bourgeois hypocrites. Her relationship with Diego Rivera which Kahlo herself writes in her diaries as one of mutual inspiration and love is often represented as an oppressive hell. Feminist stereotypes are pushed on to the narrative as Kahlo is represented as being a water woman, Diego becomes a ... oppressor, and time is spent on random lesbian affairs and the nearly "hemaphroditic" nature and strength of Frida. Kahlo is rich material for a unique story, but it seems that Braverman often resorts to oft used tropes to tell her story and describe her life.

Fictionalized accounts of real people that adopt their voice are a troubled undertaking for artists and while the poetic language and imagery of the novel is often lush and inciteful about Kahlo largely the work seems inaccurate and often incomplete in its ideas about the woman herself.

The Incantation of Frida K. by Kate Braverman

Here is yet another telling of the fascinating life of Frida Kahol, done in an unusual way by author Kate Braverman. The story is told by Frida while she is in a drug-induced state as she lays on her deathbed. Because of her state of mind, the book seems to read like a hallucinatory dream, with spurts of reality mixed in.

Frida tells her life story in bits and pieces, from the first day she meets her future lover and husband, artist and communist Diego Rivera, to her own exploits as a celebrated artist and fellow communist, and the accident that left her a cripple all her adult life. Since her memories are being told while in a drug-induced state, it is difficult to determine what is fiction and what is fact.

I found this a highly unusual book and rank it among my top 20 books of 2002. It is definitely not the book to read for one that wants to know more about Frida, but it is more of a work of art. Kate Bravermen takes the reader into the mind of an eccentric artist, and it is a fascinating journey.

As she has done with her settings--usually Los Angeles--and her characters, Kate Braverman rescues Frida Kahlo from the dumbing down process of popular culture with an once-in-a-lifetime act of fiction. "The Incantation of Frida K.," despite some of its breathtaking accuracies, is not biography, but an attempt to re-create the mind, if not the creative process, of a woman whom we can only dream to know; the raw of her, as presented by Braverman, defies the easy categorization which so often obscures legends. Sticklers for "the truth" may complain about the novel's characterization of Diego Rivera, or perhaps any other historical character, but that is not the point of an act of fiction, such as this. This novel aims to show the ignition, acceleration, and ultimate crash of a feverish imagination that was quite possibly too big for her time, if not even today's earth. Indeed, I could have read this book in a single evening if I did not have the world--and my two-year-old--to worry about.
I would say more, but it's difficult to review a book that takes your breath away; it would probably be best just to let this incredible prose speak for itself. Writing like this--radiant yet ethereal, and still sharp and insightful--is too rarely published these days. "The Incantation of Frida K." offers a rare opportunity--take it, before all the bottom line publishers take it away from us.

Kate Braverman's ingenious writing shouts and sings a high skill at poesy and narrative. I think many of her readers are attracted primarily to her imagery and metaphors. There is a sameness at the center of her stories -- illness, death, putrefaction, decline. These brilliant stories follow the trend, and Braverman leans toward epic prose poems. Her characters are memorable in one way, similar in another. What I admore most about her is her intensely evocative setting in LA, proving once more that place can pass for story. If you love clean, spare writing with a strong narrative element and distinctive characters developing new and original themes, these stories are not for you. But if you want gorgeous poems set to prose, gobble it up.

What a remarkable collection. Its really a meditation on existence. This is a museum of life in all its sadness and beauty.

My favorite type of prose are written by poets. Reading Kate Braverman is like filling on a rich desert. I am reminded of Jeanette Winterson and Arhundati Roy. It is hard to find such deeply poetic prose today. This is not a grocery store paperback--it requires slow reading and it is worth every minute. It is a feast of words and images and ideas.