A review by amandarose529
America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

challenging emotional funny informative reflective

4.25

slow in the beginning but a really beautiful novel on community and finding oneself 

“Most of all, you want to know what it’s like to get it, and not need it. Most of the time, you need things you never get; you get things no one would ever want. But getting something you want, that you don’t really need? Getting something that’s just about feeding that half-sewn-up second mouth inside you, unfed and lonely, cramped somewhere between your heart and your gut? You’ve never had that before. You’ve never had it, but you want to feel worthy of it, like the woman in the hair-dye ad you’ve been seeing around recently. You want to feel like it’s because you’re worth it.” p18

“Hero didn’t, couldn’t, answer, but held her hand out for the third piece of persimmon she knew was coming. Rosalyn put it in her palm. It tasted yeasty, like Budweiser and pig fat, and then chalky, glacial; one side of the persimmon was unripe. Hero knew then, with a wry, bleak, doubtless humor, that life was long, but this third or fourth life she was on was long, long, long, not even all the way started up yet, not even close. She had fallen down another slope; now she was being carried back up the mountain. Listening to Roslyn‘s chewing noises start up again in the dark, Hero’s throat ached, all the way down the arteries, down to where the throat met the heart. She held her hand out for the next bite.”

p182

“It was that tiny hate that spoke in her when Hero thought to herself what a formidable thing it was, what a terror, really- a girl who was loved from the very beginning.” p229

“she observed that Roslyn’s Milpitas consisted of a street where she lived, the streets where her friends lived, a two-mile wide boundary around the restaurant, and the Asian strip malls around town where the Filipino grocery stores and bakeries were located.… Hero didn’t know how many other Milpitases there were; one for every person living there, she imagined.”