The Music of Jimmy Ojotriste

Book excerpt: Jimmy is a guitar prodigy, with hair kept long to cover scars and a glass-eye that people say has a quiet moan. He pines for a Jewish flamenco dancer from Hollywood's El Cid. Vic is the trio's handsome, green-eyed tenor with a perfect ear, Vietnamese girlfriend and dreams of being a cop. His unpainted low-rider is the trio's gig car. Ray is their Chinese-Mexican violinist. He's been in love since childhood with the youngest of the Maravilla sisters, but he has incurable bone cancer. As Ray's death approaches, Jimmy's glass-eye becomes increasingly painful and lifelike. When they visit the aging oculist who created the eye, what he tells them sets three young mariachis in a Galaxy 500 on a vibrant, lyrical quest across L.A. with curanderos, gypsy flamencos, opera singers, rock stars, bohemian painters and unforgettable characters. In a sensual novel where lush harmonies and syncopated guitars rise from the page, Hernandez tackles issues of race, fate, poverty, and culture without dimming the joys of art and music, youth and first love.Review from Goodreads: "Lovely novel about young mariachis finding their place in the world, soaked in a vibrant sense of place and time. Somehow captures that feeling of being twenty and seeing the world spread before you in a way I've rarely seen portrayed well."Review from the back cover: "Wrapped in the sights and sounds of 1970s Los Angeles, vibrant and nostalgic, Hernandez explores the complex intersections of race, love, poverty and coming of age...and through it all we are serenaded by his lyrical descriptions of the life and music of the mariachi."