In his debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse introduces us to Aurora Esperanza, a young girl who with a dozen other girls and mothers, is caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting while acting out a scene from a Madonna music video on a neighborhood street corner. Each chapter of the book then follows a different character from the neighborhood, all connecting back to Aurora and the community at large.
 
The Madonnas of Echo Park is a novel that chronicles the “American-born immigrant” experience. What we usually see in immigrant fiction are depictions of a foreign land juxtaposed against scenes of adjusting to America. But what if America is the foreign land you’ve journeyed from? How do you adjust? Brando Skyhorse, a Mexican-American whose mother raised him as a Native American, tries to answer that question in this astonishing new book.
 
“We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours.” With these words, spoken by an illegal Mexican day laborer, Brando Skyhorse takes us into the unseen world of Los Angeles with the men and women who build the homes, cut the lawns, cook the meals, and struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream. The Madonnas of Echo Park is both a grand mural of a neighborhood in East Los Angeles.
 
With an astonishing versatility for voices male and female, young and old, naïve and hardened, Brando Skyhorse, like Junot Diaz or Sherman Alexie before him, illuminates a specific culture while evoking universal truths. The Madonnas of Echo Park is more than just a story about a community and the racial tensions that separate its members. Like the Academy Award-winning film Crash, it’s about the individuals in those communities, how they interact, live, fight, scheme, and love. Brando Skyhorse masterfully weaves these chapters together into a debut novel that forces its way into the hearts of readers and stays there.
 
“The hard, bitter grit of life in Echo Park, especially for women, is made quite wonderful by warmth and bright color, humor and compassion; in its keenly felt insight into the human condition, Echo Park is the world: this is who we are, like it or not. Altogether a terrific book by a highly accomplished new author—where has he been?”  —Peter Matthiessen, National Book Award-winning author of Shadow Country and The Snow Leopard
 
Brando Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine. For the past ten years he has worked in New York publishing as a book editor, at Grove Press and elsewhere. His next book, also forthcoming from Free Press, is a memoir about growing up with five stepfathers.