comments

Thank you for loaning us your novel "Cuauhtémoc and Me". We enjoyed reading it--actually aloud to each other and were fascinated and intrigued by it. The dialogues and descriptions had the effect of pulling us as readers quite graphically into the different situations being related.

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. . .you've achieved something really remarkable. The book is you: an honest and thoughtful rendering of various strands of your life, even if rearranged and transformed into magical realist fiction. I envy you for having brought all this material together and having shaped it into a readable and compelling story.

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I really so much enjoyed the journey, the restaurants, the hotels, and the landscape descriptions. It was so well done I was there, I was experiencing that part of Mexico.

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. . . your descriptions gave us a vivid feeling of being right there in the town or village or on the road or with the people that Olaf or MacClayne encountered.

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It was very exciting reading about tense situations that arose, such as driving through a river that threatened to wash all of the passengers into the sea. The plot and thread of the story came at the end as a "tour de force".

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Taking the road next to the ocean with the adventures crossing the swollen rivers certainly was exciting, with very good descriptions.

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I really liked the two friends' interaction. How they communicated and amused themselves like reading aloud to each other, how they happily seized the opportunities to pull themselves out of the little friction ruts they sometimes had. The flow of the dialog was just excellent and the continuity of their friendship was, I thought, the best part.

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I liked their early correspondence when they decided to "seek the Grail". I liked it because it seems very youthful when adults pretend. Because kids play pretend games all the time, but it's not really the thing adults do, so it's very freeing. The freedom to be a little whimsical and not locked into reality all the time.

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I loved Cuauhtémoc. His presence is an inspiration, and is deeply cooked into the aesthetic or the whole. I guess that is what I am looking at.

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The author can be contacted at danielfortyone[ ]gmail.com