Under the Feet of Jesus - Softcover

-Viramontes depicts this world with sensuous physicality... working firmly in the social-realist vein of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.---Publishers Weekly -Brilliantly executed... intense... exhibits a command of the potential magic inherent in the written word that most writers can only aspire to... a remarkable voice.---Sunday Oregonian -Captivating... vivid.---Orlando Sentinel -Lyrical... a compelling debut... Viramontes displays gifts of understanding and storytelling unusual for a first novel.---Kirkus Reviews -A beautiful story... Her writing is tactile and sonorous, but there is something more... I wanted to meet Viramontes' characters, squat down, and eat with them.---Alfredo Vea, Jr., author of La Maravilla -Tempers a restrained fury at social injustice with lovely lyrical grace... Viramontes has a keen eye for finding beauty.---Elle -Gives a fierce poetic voice to the lives of Piscadores in the California vineyards and orchards... Viramontes writes with an irresistible authority that compels our recognition and wonder.---Judith Grossman, author of Her Own Terms -A literary feat and a powerful political statement.---Seattle Times & Post-Intelligencer -A lyrical tale... Viramontes' images linger, and the book will linger for a while, too.---Washington Post Book World -A moving, heartbreaking tale of loss and survival.---Julia Alvarez, author of How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies -Stunning... blends lyricism, harsh realism and concern for social justice.---Newsweek -The best literary fiction makes its villains out of situations rather than people, and finds its heroes not in noble victors but in the spirit of ordinary men and women. In this lyrical tale of a fruit-picking family in some nameless weedy place, there is no sadistic overseer, unless it is the pitiless sun, which sucks sweat and hope from laboring bodies. Viramontes's novel comes the closest of any yet to universalizing this appalling life.---Joanne Omang, The Washington Post -An exciting read... Throughout this rich novel, Viramontes brings us into her world and we fall under her spell.---Los Angeles Times Book Review -A remarkable tale... a wealth of robust colors and magic... Readers will take to the lushness of Under the Feet of Jesus like a thirsty traveler to a well.---Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List

At the center of this powerful tale is Estrella, a girl about to cross over the perilous border to womanhood. What she knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment by her husband in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the farms that feed its people...from the aging but iron-bodied man who reluctantly becomes the head of the family, even as dreams of his youth in Mexico are calling him home...and from the endless highways and vast fields of California, where they travel and work together. But within Estrella, seeds of growth and change are stirring. And in the arms of Alejo, only a few years older than herself, they burst into full fierce flower, as she tastes the joy and pain of first love. Estrella begins to listen to her own inner voice in giving herself to that love. She comes to learn the value of life and discovers her own power to defy a system that would otherwise keep her down. Pushed to the margins of society, she learns to fight back and is able to help the young farmworker she loves when his ambitions and very life are threatened in a harvest of death. Infused with the beauty of the California landscape and shifting splendors of the passing seasons juxtaposed with the bleakness of poverty, this vividly imagined novel, so observant and full of wisdom, is worthy of the people it celebrates and whose story it tells so magnificently. The simple lyrical beauty of Viramontes's prose, her haunting use of image and metaphor, and the urgency of her themes all announce Under the Feet of Jesus as a landmark work of American fiction.