Painted Cities

Reviewed at (now defunct) Bookshelf Bombshells.
Good thing I'm a digital hoarder.
——

Painted Cities is a collection of short stories about growing up in Pilsen, a south side barrio in Chicago. Getting into it, I was a little worried that Painted Cities would be a variety of different stories about the same thing and that it wouldn't hold my interest. In a way, I was right, since Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski writes almost solely about growing up in a dangerous barrio populated by gang members, but I was completely captivated by this collection.

Galaviz-Budziszewski's short stories are written in a way that transported me to that time and place. I've never been to the south side of Chicago, and I have no idea what it looks like, but the descriptions of Pilsen gave me a solid mental picture of the neighborhood. In the second story, “1817 S. May,” the narrator explains what his childhood summer days were like—panning for gold at the May Street curb with his sister, which caught on with other kids, and the battles in the neighborhood over which street could get the highest water dome from a fire hydrant. “1817 S. May” begins as a relatively happy exercise in nostalgia but culminates in tragedy. The stories in Painted Cities explain how nonsensical childhood adventures, such as panning for gold in Chicago gutters, can be interrupted with the hardships of these characters' daily lives.

Each story seems so grounded in reality—tales of house fires, drive-by shootings, cousins lost, pubescent misadventures—that I almost skipped over the beautiful magic that is the story “God's Country.” As I finished “God's Country,” I realized that I'd read an entire story about a teenager Spoilerwith the ability to bring the dead back to life without even thinking about it. The writing blended together so well that I hadn't even considered that there wasn't a person in Pilsen with the Spoilerability to bring back dead pigeons. “God's Country” was a nice reminder, to me at least, that good fiction can make you believe anything.

Borrow It: This was a well-written, well-organized, and good collection of short stories, but it lacked something that made me want to finish it quickly. Each story feels complete on its own, so it would be easy to put Painted Cities down and come back to it later.