In a most rare occurrence in my ebook reading days, I did not check once how far I had read in this book. I just kept reading about Big Angel's family, his proudest moments, and his worst regrets. Luis Alberto Urrea's new novel The House of Broken Angels tells the history of a Mexican-American family and how they are brought together for one weekend to celebrate the patriarch Big Angel's last birthday and his mother's funeral.

Urrea writes of the past, present, and possible future of each cousin, sister, and uncle. The characters struggle with the that eternal question of what makes a person successful and of value to each other. And because Big Angel is terminally ill, he spends most of his days contemplating his value to his family. One of his friends encourages him to keep a journal of all the things he will miss. His list includes the mundane, everyday things of life, but also the special intangibles that make family and life so precious.

The House of Broken Angels is special book about the American Experience. I'll be thinking about it and recommending it to people for a long time.

Thank you to NetGalley, Little, Brown and Company, and Mr. Urrea for the advanced copy to review.

This is a sweeping family epic that is deeply personal, and passionately told. Big Angel is the patriarch of his multi generational Mexican and Mexican-American family who are getting together for two days. The first day is for his mother's funeral, and the next is for his birthday, the birthday that he knows will be his last because he is dying of cancer.
The author uses multiple points of view to tell everyone's stories, with numerous flash backs, that I never felt lost in. All these characters really come to life and this was a story I didn't want to end.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys a great story that easily crosses cultural lines and can be felt and relatable to anyone.
Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this arc available through netgalley.

Fabulous book. Thoroughly loved. Highly recommend!

Big Angel de la Cruz is dying. However, he has two things to take care of over the next few days before he goes. First, he must avoid being late to his mother’s funeral. Second, he needs to join his extended family and many friends in celebrating his own 70th birthday party. That is the basic plot of The House of Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urrea’s deeply affecting meditation on, among other things, the joys and foibles of family life, the challenges of being caught between two cultures, and the impact that one man can have on those around him.

The novel traces Big Angel’s story from his youth in La Paz, Mexico under the domineering presence of his father Don Antonio to his exile from the family that eventually takes him to Tijuana and San Diego, California. Along the way, we meet many of the important people in his life, including his beloved wife Perla, their siblings, their children, and their seemingly countless nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. Big Angel’s journey is often hard and heartbreaking, but one that is filled with considerable joy as well. Urrea’s storytelling is heartfelt and beautiful, at once elegiac and humorous in roughly equal measures, with a fair amount of Spanglish thrown in for authentic measure.

As he reveals at the outset in a letter to the reader, this is a deeply personal account for the author, whose alter ego appears in the character of Little Angel, the younger brother who has spent much of his adult life trying to escape the family’s influence. The two brothers share a decidedly complicated history—they have the same father but different mothers, and both are conflicted about various aspects of their Mexican-American heritage. While much of the narrative development in The House of Broken Angels is devoted to explaining and resolving their relationship, that is not the essence of the novel. Urrea set out to make this a story about “la familia” and he has succeeded admirably in doing just that. These are characters who will stay with me for a while.