Click on Cover for Amazon Purchase Link
Julio Robalo Opens the Door To His Mouth
A novel by Joan Tewkesbury
US$ 19.95
ISBN: 978-0-9983443-7-9
Julio Robalo is a teacher and a poet, or rather a poet who has yet to begin to express himself. He lives in a district somewhere South of the border that is ruled by a dictator known only as “The Person in Charge,” who has outlawed teaching, turned the local school into a beauty parlor, regularly “disappears” people, and has turned the local town into a village of informants. Set in a time of pandemic, this is also a love story: Julio is in love with Fatima Marie, who is married to another man.
Written with Tewkesbury's characteristic wit and humor, this novel is a kind of fable for our times, both humorous and tragic, with stories of people who live under the horrors of fascism and yet persist to find love and meaning in a chaotic world.
No wonder Joan Tewkesbury is one of Hollywood's most celebrated screenplay writers. This latest novel reads like a movie on the page, with a wonderful sense of the absurd, replete with vividly revealed characters; narrated with her droll diagonal gaze, but also with compassion.
Quotidian encounters and occurrences beg wider philosophical and moral questions; these dark times need redemptive literature, and here is a novel wherein stolen love trumps banality and violence - in the end.
Tewkesbury has written a precious jewel of a book, a ruby in the dust.
Ed Vulliamy, author of Amexica: War Along The Borderline
...poetic, elegant, moving, at once hilarious and wrenching and elegiac.
In these intertwined tales, narrated in short astonishing sentences by Julio Robalo, the language floats, then soars: these are words to savor, to remind us of the wild joys of reading. Joan Tewkesbury knows how to break our hearts and how to mend them. We turn each page awaiting new surprise.
author of Great Eastern and
Destiny Express