The Flowers Paperback – February 3, 2009

I was spellbound. Read it one sitting. Glib's writing drew me in and I was sorry when the book ended. That doesn't happen with many books. I wanted more of this experience, whatever it was.

Great book!

ordered the book for my english class. was very surprised to when i actually found myself not wanting to put the book down

Sonny Bravo, a flower himself, trying to bloom in the concrete jungle which is home or not, where culture, prejudice and poverty strip life down to its bare roots. An amazing use of language mixed with the dreamy, magical quality of the Latino mastery of image. I couldn't put it down.

Awesome product and they delivered it quick thank you!

bought this as a gift for my girlfriend. She hasn't started reading it but this is what she wanted... book was in good condition.

Dagoberto Gilb is considered to be a leading voice of the Southwest. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, then wandered throughout the Southwest until he made his way to Texas as a young man. While working as a construction worker near the University of Texas of El Paso he had a fateful meeting with his future friend and mentor, Raymond Carver. The rest, as they say, is history. Such is the larger-than-life almost mythical birth of a writer known as Gilb, who looks like actor Armand Assante of Odyssey fame. In Gilb's novel, The Flowers, Sonny Bravo, a high school student, wants to help himself while helping others. This is a coming-of-age story about the triumph of the human spirit.I don't know whether or not Sonny is a good student in school, but what really stands out is that despite the lack of parental supervision, he wakes up every morning and walks to school. Given his background, and alienation from society, it would have been easy for Sonny to become passive and give up the fight--to drop out of school, but Sonny not only goes to school, he takes on the challenge of teaching himself French. Sonny is bilingual, on his way to becoming trilingual through his independent study. He is an optimistic, forward thinking young man who blocks out the present and yearns for the future. This says a lot about him as a person.It is his mother Sylvia's obligation to raise her son but she is wrapped up in her own drama, and cannot see beyond her own situation. The Flowers is an intricate study in the abuses of power on the part of various people in Sonny's life beginning with his self-centered mother and his alcoholic new stepfather to a belligerent racist tenant, and an eighteen-year old female drug addict who seduces him.A good home environment is not available to Sonny. Because his mother refuses to cook, Sonny improvises and adapts, buying his own meals. Sonny will not starve. He is a survivor who values his life.Sonny falls in love with a teenage tenant who is virtually kept a prisoner in her apartment babysitting her brother and prevented from going to school by her mother and stepfather. By stepping outside of his own situation and helping others, Sonny is able to see beyond himself and avoid the narrow minded point of view of his mother and stepfather.Dagoberto Gilb has made a huge contribution to American Letters. In addition to The Flowers, he has published one other novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994). Gilb is also a prolific short story writer beginning with Winners on the Pass Line and Other Stories (1985). His second collection is the award-winning The Magic of Blood (1993), Woodcuts of Women (2001) and most recently, Before the End, After the Beginning (2011). His collection of nonfiction essays Gritos (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and the anthology, Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature (2006) winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award is assigned as a text in high school and college campuses across the United States.If you enjoy the true-to-life realism of Stephen Crane and Raymond Carver, Dagoberto Gilb is the contemporary writer for you. Gilb writes without melodrama or sentimentality, he is generous enough to let the reader draw their own conclusions.

Dagoberto Gilb does a wonderful job evoking the harshly pungent atmosphere of the barrio, but the real triumph of "The Flowers" is the way Gilb gets inside the mind of a fifteen year old boy. Gilb shows how a fifteen year old is driven to trespass beyond boundaries in order to test himself, and how his underdeveloped sense of self both protects and threatens his survival.Gilb's protagonist, "Sonny" Bravo, ranges freely among the residents of "Los Flores", the apartment complex where he has come to live with his attractive, flirtatious mother and her current beau, a crude man named Cloyd Longpre. Sonny is schooled in the ways of love by a disenchanted, promiscuous woman upstairs, but he saves his romantic longings for his idealized, platonic love--Nico, who is closer to his age. Sonny's increasing waywardness and sticky-fingers threaten to sweep him into a world of trouble, and it finally arrives in the form of a race riot.Gilb is good at showing how a young kid finds shelter for his dreams even in the midst of squalor... and how the muddle of adolescence is universal. Sonny Bravo could be the Chicano "Holden Caulfield", or "Jim Stark" (Rebel Without a Cause). But Gilb underlines how, unlike those white teenaged icons, Sonny faces a much less certain fate.This is definitely a book worth recommending.