Some excellent stories, but some that bore. Murguia has the sense of place and delivery of a culture down pat, but needs more skill in weaving a tale. I wanted to like this book more than I did, having read some of his other work, but overall it was pretty forgettable quickly after reading.

Thsee stories show us a part of the real world, rather than isolated characters on a literary stage. Murguia's narrators are story-tellers, and their voices are wildly varied, but each so dead-on that reading is hearing them talk. Reading is easy despite Murguia's elaborate blending of ideas, feelings, and information. In "El Ultimo Round," for example a pair of movement cognoscenti hash out their politics drunk as skunks on the freeway.
You could use the book to learn a little Mexican Spanish or history or get a modern male view about love. Some of the stories are set-pieces. A very short one about a little boy selling roses reminded me of the moment in A Streetcar Named Desire when the heroine opens the door and sees an old woman calling "flores para los muertos -- flowers for the dead." She slams the door, realizing she can't just walk out on her dysfunctional family; there's just one escape from her dysfunctional self.
Moments like that risk becoming sops to a reader's conscience (we all face death, so what's a little oppression here and there...). Murguia dodges this risk by rooting his characters firmly in the real world. In the first story, a boy's dreamy cinematic image of his actress mother broods over the earthquake-transfigured city, but we and he spend most of our time with the facts of boyhood friendships, fights and betrayals, the vanished neighborhoods, and the history of Mexican cinema.
Murguia can celebrate the poor without romanticizing. In Ofrendas, the Day of the Dead in the Mission district comes through in its full seasoned exuberance. In A Lesson in Merengue, the dance instructor lets us know merengue can be fun, but can also mean getting grabbed by some random guy and going through the steps as fast as you possibly can until your feet and back are killing you. In Lucky Alley when a man rips off the woman he genuinely loves, even he knows she ought to leave, but we still wish she would come back. This one has the most skillful ending for a love story I've read in a long time.
Most of the writing is plain and direct, but word games and ironies lie just under the surface. A Toda Maquina has a guy fall against all odds in love, while heading with a stash in the back of his truck toward what he calls El Ley, which is LA, not a little desert town named Law.
There's a fair amount of Spanish, unitalicized, but most of the Spanish words are cognates or well known, or Murguia tips off the reader, unless they're curses. Toning down English dialog is something every writer does (just count the f's dropped in a typical coffee shop chat versus a typical novel these days). Here the Spanish gets away with more, which can create an impression that Spanish is the natural language of the unmentionable, one of the many subtle risks facing work like Murguia's, that can only be overcome by more books like his.

Mr. Murguia is an excellent writter as well as an excellent teacher. He brings us into the story by sending vivid pictures into our mind and letting us experience exactly what the charater is feeling. I feel that my family could relate to it as well. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone.