\n
LITERARY FICTION\/SPORTS<\/p>\n
Elliott Turner<\/span><\/p>\nThe Night of the Virgin: A Novel<\/span><\/p>\nRound Ball Media<\/p>\n
Paperback, 978-0-6927-8103-6, (also available as an e-book), 298 pgs., $15.97<\/p>\n
June 1, 2017<\/p>\n
Emmanuel \u201cManny\u201d Hernandez grew up in Brownsville, Texas, loving books<\/span>\u2014his mother dropped him off at the library during summers to avoid running expensive air conditioning\u2014and soccer. Manny longs to escape South Texas but is constrained by his undocumented status\u2014he\u2019s a Dreamer, brought to Texas by his mother when he was a toddler. He refers to the Border Patrol checkpoint at Falfurrias as garrita<\/span> (\u201cclaw\u201d). In eighteen years, Manny hasn\u2019t been further from Brownsville (\u201ca prison and his sentence was ad infinitum\u201d) than that checkpoint. But to follow his soccer dream Manny must brave the checkpoint, and so one day he does, with his sister, Maribel, and his best friend, Hector, and they make it through, all the way to San Antonio and a chance at more.<\/p>\nThe Night of the Virgin: A Novel<\/span> is the fiction debut of Houston freelance journalist Elliott Turner. Part inside soccer, part coming-of-age story, The Night of the Virgin<\/span> is an uneven but thoughtful, knowledgeable, and illuminating first novel.<\/p>\nWe meet Manny in a hospital emergency room after he\u2019s broken his leg during practice with the San Francisco Gales professional soccer team. In and out of consciousness, Manny grows reflective, moving back and forth in time, from the present to the past, into the future, and back again. Turner also changes perspectives, from third person to Manny\u2019s first person in the form of diaries dating back to childhood. The pacing is highly variable, with a disjointed narrative and abrupt shifts, and my attention wandered at times. Turner\u2019s male characters feel authentic; they are complex and diverse in race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and religion. His female characters aren\u2019t as detailed; Maribel is a presence in most of the novel but in the end, we still don\u2019t know her.<\/p>\n
The Night of the Virgin<\/span> is often funny. Manny continually reinvents himself after the end of his soccer career and obtains a teaching certificate. \u201c[Manny] imagined Socratic dialogues and articulate debates,\u201d Turner writes. \u201cIn reality, he had stood up to millionaire coaches and billionaire owners, but was about to get his ass kicked by a group of twenty-five high schoolers.\u201d Turner\u2019s deceptively simple prose is often sly, and he is skilled at dialogue, especially a technique where only one side of the conversation is heard. Unfortunately, there\u2019s not enough dialogue\u2014he tells more than he shows. Turner appreciates language, especially the geographical variations of Spanish. \u201cThe Rio Bravo has long separated the US from Mexico and English from Spanish,\u201d he writes. \u201cYet those inhabiting the border often speak both languages and have twisted the two tongues.\u201d<\/p>\nTexas, particularly the borderland and Rio Grande Valley, come alive in The Night of the Virgin.<\/span> \u201cIn the RGV, as in ancient Rome, time and people moved slower.\u201d Before Manny moves up to the pros he plays for a minor-league soccer team in San Antonio, his \u201cweekends filled with road trips to Odessa and other small Texas towns forlorn by civilization, but full of humidity and dust.\u201d<\/p>\nThe Night of the Virgin<\/span> is a bumpy beginning, but Turner has promise. Soccer fans will appreciate this novel, and I wait with interest to see what Turner does next.<\/p>\n* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"https:\/\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/sites\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/files\/description\/newby%2c%20michelle_headshot_sm.jpg\")
<\/span><\/span><\/span>