Country of the Bad Wolfes
A portrait of Mexican culture and history during the nineteenth century, this lengthy family saga clops along at a leisurely pace, tracing the rise and fall of Mexico’s President Diaz and a wealthy merchant family, the Wolfes. Using his own family genealogy as a model, Blake digs nuggets of fictional family lore out of the murky past and sets them in chronological order, one vignette at a time. Irish pirate Roger Blake Wolfe escapes to the U.S. and sires twins whose reckless exploits land them in Mexico a generation later, where they build a flawed dynasty based on questionable business practices. As another set of swashbuckling, impassively cruel twins repeats the familial pattern of crime, success, and flight, the plot wends its way toward the inevitable. Readers will find themselves flipping to the family tree at the front to figure out who the characters are, though the message is clear: the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the sons throughout the generations. This is historical fiction in the manner of Umberto Eco, long on detail, short on character, many-faceted, slow, and savory. --Jen Baker