What a wonderful use of language to express emotions and setting this author has. Sympathetic characters all, trying but failing to push back against cultural boundaries. Loved the first story, Mountains without numbers. There is something so melancholy and realistic about this one. Scenes like this are probably happening in dying towns all over America, people stuck in their lives remembering when their lives seemed much fuller.Loved to Mr Mendoza, with his use of humor and magical realism, onc...

"So this was New Year's Day. This was sunlight. Seventy-eight degrees. This was the sound of the barrio awakening from the party: doves mourning the passing of night, pigeons in the dead palm trees chuckling amid rattling fronds, the mockingbird doing car alarm and church bell iterations in Big Angel's olive trees in front of the house. Junior pulled the pillow over his head — it was those kids with their Big Wheels making all that noise."--Urrea I am proud to say Luis Urrea is a friend and coll...

For whatever reason, when I started this book of short stories I was not 100% focused. I could tell the writing was excellent, but the stories just weren't grabbing me. It was the audible version, this happens to me sometimes. However, along came the eponymous story, and I realized that this was brilliant in every way. Very timely and moving. The final story: Bid Farewell to her Many Horses, may have made me cry.So...I started reading them again in reverse order back to the beginning. They are s...

I devoured this book and want to go back and take my time going through it again, letting each story linger with its beauty and its insight. There is a common thread tying these pieces together - how we care for, or don't care for, each other, including the way in which we use this planet and how that may look down the road. As someone who lives in a drought state, "The Water Museum" has been hard to shake.These stories are beautiful not because of flowery language or happy endings, though Urrea...

These thirteen beautifully detailed stories share a common thread of grief and redemption. Every story is strong – my favorites being “Carnations” and “The White Girl,” both are brief snippets, but reach deep into your chest. Urrea elicits such empathy for his characters, addressing race relations in the American west with a variety of literally styles and realistic scenarios. Literal and figurative borders. Solid collection!

Short stories aren't my favorite books to read. I'm working on a reading list, where reading a collection of short stories is required. I chose this one because I've read this author before and liked his style. I really enjoyed the first two stories in this book. I was thrilled that I was actually liking it, ... that is when it started unraveling for me. I didn't enjoy the rest of them as much. But I loved the writing. I like how he addresses cultural differences and how life is as an illegal in...

urrea should be the mega million seller of books he's written,not some dead hackish lady, or some uk twat and her owls and stuff.it was a delight to revisit (some of these stories were in his first book Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction ) mr. mendoza and his biting paint brush graffito in our rural and dying mexican town, and the professor and the indian somewhere in southeast wyoming shooting the dear wife's already dead volvo. plus too there are stories taken from previous publis...

What a fantastic short story collection from a phenomenal writer! The Water Museum features a memorable mix of characters, many of them indigenous, Mexican, or Mexican-American, reflecting Urrea's own background. Themes of grief, loss, and painful coming of age are prominent throughout the collection, and yet the stories are often funny. My favorites included the very first story, "Mountains Without Number," in which we meet a middle-aged woman running a cafe in a dying small town, still scarred...

Can I have special dispensation to give this book seven stars instead of just five? I finished the Water Museum last night. I had bought it some time ago ( I think I pre-ordered) from Audible. I LOVE his work, but I especially love it when he is reading it, and yet because I am not a fan of short stories, AT ALL, I'd not started it, until I saw that the book had put Urrea and this book into the short list, the top five for the PEN/Faulkner. Then I binge read (listened) to the 13 stories and love...

Book, it's not you, it's me! These stories were very compelling, well written, smart. Because I have met the author, I could almost hear him reading aloud. But, well, the failed American Dream has never been my favorite subject. So I give it 5 stars for quality and 2 stars for how much I identify with it.

Stories all (mostly all?) set in the western U.S. I loved the stories featuring members of the Her Many Horses family and Big Angel's family in San Diego. But sometimes I couldn't get into the "voice" of the different stories. It felt a bit contrived at times or that the author was just trying too hard.

What a terrific collection and Urrea does an excellent job narrating. Looking forward to meeting him, at Booktopia Petoskey.

I'm sitting in the catbird seat. Late to the party, having never read anything by Luis Alberto Urrea before, I now have a trove of his novels, stories, poetry and nonfiction to look forward to!It wasn't love at first sight. His stark story, "Mountains Without Number," the first in his new collection, "The Water Museum," didn't seduce me. It's the story of a dying town near Idaho Falls, all the young people have wisely moved away and the remaining aged residents meet up at the diner each morning

Luis Alberto Urrea's new book, The Water Museum, is extraordinarily well timed. As California undergoes the "mega-drought" it is a fitting reference to dry places where water is hard won. Urrea shares the story of those that live in these water-scarce lands. Perhaps a few years ago, these concepts may seem foreign to many readers, but now many more can make the connection here. Some of these short stories are continuations of themes found in Urrea's previous work Into the Beautiful North, but mo...

This book of short stories "grew" on me as I became more familiar with author's style. I did wish that I knew more about Spanish and the Mexican culture. I think I would have gotten even more out of it if I had. Different stories had me crying or laughing out loud. Always a good sign.

I read this slowly so it wouldn't end but eventually it did.

I became interested in The Water Museum after reading the starred review it received from Kirkus. Upon further basic Internet investigation, I learned that Urrea is indeed an accomplished craftsman of contemporary literary fiction. Since I read a lot of literary fiction each year, these facts were enough to recommend the work as one likely to reward my time and effort. Indeed, I was ultimately glad I discovered Urrea's writing. In this story collection, his narratives and the characters that peo...

"Urrea's writing is wickedly good." That's a blurb from the jacket of one of his books. For some reason it has stayed with me. This is one of my favorite writers. I think the first work of his that I read was The Hummingbird's Daughter. I loved it. It's a fictionalized account of the life of Urrea's actual great-aunt Teresita. He researched historical records and family accounts for years before he had it all down in print. It is story telling at its best.Urrea is not only a novelist. He writes

Like any collection, some of these stories resonated with me more strongly than others. That said, every story immediately drew me into the world it created, whether it was a world I wanted to inhabit or not. With a few nods to magical realism, most of these stories are of the slice-of-life variety, opening a momentary window into the current situation of each character. Most of these individuals are grappling with trauma - external, self-inflicted, current, past, all kinds - and you can't help

So excellent. Deserves a real review someday, maybe when I inevitably reread it.