• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2022 November #2
  *Starred Review* The "faraway" worlds Engel (Infinite Country, 2021) describes in this heart-warming collection of short stories are ones her characters spin to survive. When you're an immigrant in a land that's radically different from your own or when your economic circumstances compel you to imagine escape, an imagined world that can give you succor is exactly what you need. In "Aida," a disappeared girl's twin imagines life after her sister. "Our mother liked to think she raised us to live in a bigger world, but Aida and I only wanted a world together." In "Fausto," on the other hand, the world his girlfriend imagines is forever out of reach as a young man gets involved in drug trafficking to deliver the riches expected of him. Engel is an expert at painting the lives of the marginalized and she excels again as she travels from Colombia to Cuba to the U.S. "Things are changing, Marco says, though to me nothing has changed," says the narrator of "The Bones of Cristobal Colon," about Cuba. Time might be static for some or too fluid for others. Nevertheless it passes by even as we try to build our worlds, brick by brick. Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews.

Patricia Engel is the author of Infinite Country, a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club selection; The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of Colombia’s national book award, the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, and herself a dual citizen, Patricia is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Miami.