Fiction. Latino/a Studies. It's the spring of 1978 and sixteen-year-old Antonio (Tony) McCaugh has just tried slashing his wrists. His mother arranges for her despondent son to spend the summer with his Uncle Jack in California as a sure-fire plan for lifting Tony out of his despair. The plan works, but at the same time Tony begins to discover that there is more to his uncle than the macho clichA[aA of family legends. El Savador from 1870 though the 1930s is the setting for this sprawling populist mural of a novel . Imaginative testimony on behalf of an entire people -- Publishers Weekly.