I didn't really enjoy this book. I kept picking it up and putting it down. I was hoping to love it, as my family is from there, but I just couldn't get into the rhythm of the story telling.

Doesn’t that description sound wonderful? I thought so too, which was why I requested it from NetGalley. It’s too bad that description is a steaming heap of lies, much like this book.

I knew this book was going to suck from the moment I started it. I downloaded the book in April, read the first short story, and hated it. The premise was ridiculous and the characters were flat. The plot was wonky and I just found it dumb. I had a sinking feeling about the book, and at the time I was closing in on college graduation, so I put it down for several months. Now, my life has calmed down a bit, so I picked it back up, hoping it had magically gotten better. It hadn’t.

I (mostly) got through two more short stories before I got too disgusted to continue. The first was shorter, about an American high school teacher in Mexico who had two students in a Romeo and Juliet situation. First off: the main plot, the students’ forbidden romance, was not just a literal soap opera, but also a direct and awful ripoff of Shakespeare. The author didn’t even peg the story as a retelling, he just took the Romeo and Juliet plot and made it far worse. Second: the main character, the schoolteacher, was someone I would absolutely hate in real life. He was a creep who followed his students around after school, listening at motel doors as they had sex, while praising himself as being their protector. He spent his evenings like this for a month, despite having his own wife at home, who apparently married him in some unexplained twist of events even though her father was vehemently against their relationship from the moment they met. That backstory, by the way, was thrown in there at random in between the MC creeping around after his underage students. In addition to the MC having no self awareness to speak of, the language of this story was just weird and gross. At one point, he thinks of the motel “where Sandra and Jose had been mating”. Who talks like that? Who writes like that?

The second story was not much better, and it was much longer. This plot revolved around two women in a waiting room, one who was about to get a double mastectomy, and one, strikingly beautiful apparently, who had horrible scars from past abuse. During the intro, Barkan spent multiple paragraphs on what each woman’s body looked like. Sometimes, body descriptions are necessary to the story, especially for characters with these backstories. But these descriptions sounded more like bad erotica than information necessary to the story. It sounded to me like Barkan prefers sitting at a computer thinking about naked women than crafting a well-done plot. It also sounds to me like he has not spoken to many real women, because the way the characters spoke in the story was unrealistic and contrived. The majority of the chapter consisted of the beautiful woman describing her past life and abuse — she had become homeless as a teen and got caught up into some type of sex trade. This kind of story is very real and probably should be written about more. But this was the worst way to write about it. Barkan romanticized the woman’s abuse, and painted her as a tragic, beautiful character. It was the ultimate “wounded woman” trope, and honestly, it struck me more like a disgusting sexual fantasy than the sad reality I think it was intended to be.

I could not read any more. The writing is awful. The characters suck. The plots are weird and fake and not paced well at all. My final complaint is that even if these stories were written well, most of them are from the point of view of Americans in Mexico, and the nature of the plots serve to propagate the many negative stereotypes about Mexicans that a lot of Americans (including, apparently, Barkan) still believe. Don’t read this book. Don’t buy this book. I honestly don’t know how this trash got past the editor.

Rating: 2.27 Stars

The Chef and El Chapo: (3 Stars) while I'm not sure I understood the point of the story, it was well written and full of emotion: passion for cooking, terror when El Chapo takes over the restaurant, and fear/regret once the chef has completed the task set before him. The ending felt a twee bit hollow, but I hope the chef was able to find comfort in his decision.

The God of Common Names: (3 Stars) this is the story of a teacher and the Romeo & Juliet situation he finds between two of his students. While that seemed like it might play a large part in the story, in the end it didn't really. The story of Sandra and Jose was more of a catalyst for the resolution of the teacher's own familial difficulties. I was more interested in the pain and hardship he and his wife and father-in-law were experiencing, due to the teacher being an atheist Jew and the father-in-law an Orthodox Jew. The length of the tale was adequate, though I'm not sure that the ending was quite as tied up as the author would like us to believe. It felt temporary, like there will be more trouble ahead for this teacher and his family, but that is a story we will never get to see.

I liked the thought behind the title, though: how, even though we give different names to the same thing (in this case, the teacher's idea of a greater power and his father-in-law's God), it is should be alright because we should know they're the same thing, just by a different name.

I Want to Live: (2.5 Stars) The summary of this collection insinuates that the primary characters' stories run up against cartel violence, but I would argue that this is an instance in which that was not true. We are introduced to a former nurse from the U.S. who has relocated to Mexico City. Five years later she is in a hospital waiting room, trying to decide is she should have a preventative mastectomy, when she meets Esmeralda, an orphan who grew up and met a rising star of the cartel world.

It is Esmeralda's story that is told through the bulk of I Want to Live and it was her's that was most interesting. The few interjections that the former nurse made made her sound like a selfish character, something that Esmeralda observes more than once herself. She got Esmeralda to tell her her story because she made uninformed observations about Esmeralda's physical characters and, when confronted by evidence to the contrary, she badgers her into explaining how these marks occurred.

This made the nurse an unlikable character to me and I did not care one whit about her decision in the end because it didn't matter. Esmeralda was the person that I was more interested in hearing about, though I am curious as to what she was doing in the same hospital waiting room as our American nurse. There was never anyone in to see her, to take her away to an appointment. It felt like a very contrived meeting arranged just for the nurse's "benefit" in the story. In the end, despite what the nurse decided and her rudeness toward Esmeralda (both in asking about her story and her assumption that Esmeralda wanted to tell the story to her despite no evidence of such), I found Esmeralda's strength profound.

Acapulco: (1 Star) The first couple of paragraphs had me disliking the narrator. In a book of stories that take place in Mexico, this person started off disparaging the country straight away, saying that police reports cannot be taken seriously, older Mexican men are all unfaithful and have lovers on the side of their marriages, but he (the narrator) is better than that because he left that all behind when his parents sent him to study in Harvard. He goes on to try to make it sound like saying this is all okay because he considers himself to be from Mexico because he was raised there, his family is from there, but he is a citizen of the world. That sounds like he is either a) distancing himself from his Mexican culture/heritage or b) someone who was born abroad, raised in Mexico City, but thinks himself better than natives. His arrogance was appalling and had me viewing him with a side eyed expression.

He continued to talk down about the people he came in contact with, especially his client who wore a gold Rolex, which apparently in his mind was bad because it reeked of new money whereas his (the narrator's) money was old (as though that meant something in the grand scheme of things).

This was my second least favorite story because this man, this architect, was an arrogant person that, after encountering a near death experience, seems to have learned something, but that revelation feels false in light of the arrogance he demonstrated in the beginning.

The Kidnapping: (1 Star) This one started doff with a bad taste in my mouth when the author used a derogatory word beginning with a T to describe sex workers in the character's neighborhood. There was no reason for it, no learning from it, just...ick. 😠 The character using this word, the painter who is a kidnapping victim, uses the term again in a reminiscence and once more at the end of the story and it still sucks.

Aside from the offensive language used more than once, there was a distinct lack of characterization that made the story suffer. I didn't know enough about this painter to care when he was kidnapped or when the kidnappers tortured him. All I had to go on was his disrespect for transgender people and that made me dislike him.

The Plastic Surgeon: (2 Stars) The problem I had with this story was that it had the storyline meant for an faster paced piece and the writing did not live up to it. The telling became almost philosophical and that didn't mesh well with story of the plastic surgeon who is forced to makeover a narco boss. With a conclusion that was anything but conclusive, I found that I was bored by The Plastic Surgeon and couldn't really find a facet of it that would save it in my esteem.

The Sharpshooter: (No rating) This story wasn't bad, exactly, it was simply of a type that wasn't for me, thus I found it painfully boring. The story of a young soldier full of ideals, dealing with a friend and fellow soldier who betrays him and their company, didn't interest me; most Army stories don't. If this were a book on its own, I wouldn't give it a rating because this is a case of a story that I can tell is simply not my thing, but there are people that might appreciate it, perhaps people that enjoy reading about soldiers and their personal conflicts.

The Painting Professor: (1 Star) Like the last story The Sharpshooter this one was also ridiculously boring, but unlike the previous story this one wasn't written well, even from an objective point of view. It didn't seem to have a point and what thread of coherence it had got lots in the rambling writing.

The American Journalist: (2 Stars) There wasn't much development in this story, either from a character perspective or otherwise. By this point it seemed all of the short stories in the collection took place in the same area or nearly so, so the setting wasn't as big of a let down, but I didn't care much about the journalist or his friend that was shot.

The most interesting thing about this to was from the beginning, when the journalist talked about how his paper, the Houston Chronicle, and other papers like it, only cared about running stories that fit into a certain narrative. For example, one about bombings in other countries that then make the American people feel safe because they don't live there. It can be incredibly difficult to get a story through mainstream media because of such "comfort" and his pointing that out from a journalistic standpoint was interesting.

Everything Else Is Going to Be Fine: (1.5 Stars) If ever there was a disjointed story in Mexico, it is this one. The character "told" the reader his story and that felt off. The pieces of story we did get might have worked in a better narrative, but combined as they were felt like pages had been ripped out of a book and sewn back together badly. Whats-more, I felt badly that he had been molested and raped as a child, but I felt like the author was using that part of the character's past to explain his possible asexuality. That confused me and made me uncomfortable, upset, and not at all pleased with the story.

The Prison Breakout: (4 Stars) I favored this story for the feeling of non-fiction it gave me. The main character, a man that helps find the history of men on death row in order to explain why they may have committed their crime, starts out the story talking about growing up, seeing crimes happening on a global scale, and knowing they were wrong, voicing his displeasure with them, but ultimately not doing anything about it. That's something that should resonate with a lot of people today, with the atrocities we see being committed against people because of their gender/race/sexuality/etc. For all the talk, what do we really do?

The Escape From Mexico: (4 Stars) When I got to this story, I was feeling rather disheartened by the collection overall. The first few stories had been alright, but then I was hit by a bunch that were, in my opinion, just bad. I felt suckered in and upset about that. This story, while it doesn't save the collection, made me feel at least a little better that I stuck it out to the end.

This is the story about Gordi, a young boy who runs up against another young man, one who is in charge of a gang at the age of fourteen and has marked Gordi for punishment: either death or gang recruitment, for a crime Gordi did not commit, but that this person holds him responsible for. The terror of the weeks where Gordi is searching for the watch, then trying to avoid the gangster, trying to find a way out of this, was palpable. His mother comes into the story too, a true testament to a mother's love and willingness to do anything to save her son.

What I did not like about the story was that, midway through, there was a brief change in perspective, from Gordi to his mother, but it remained in first person and there didn't feel like enough of a difference in the voice of each perspective. If it were not for pronouns or the mother out and out saying that she was Gordi's mother, I would not have realized what happened.

Summary: First of all, this book was mostly a letdown. It felt like it told only about the bad things in Mexico without any of the good, playing upon the stereotypes that Americans have of the country. I'm not saying that these things don't happen, but if all we see in literature about Mexico is the type of content in this book, what sort of view will the readers form?

Second, one of the oddest things about this collection was that the title, Mexico, gave me cause to think that it would be about the people. While it was, in a way, the main characters for the majority of the stories were American. What characters were Mexican were often involved in the drug word, portrayed as some other kind of criminal, or spoken of in slurs by the narrating voice. I expected there to be some violence, as the summary spoke of the narrowing of the divide between the cartel world and the "real" world, but this played too heavily to that theme.

I was disappointed in the overall quality of the stories because it seems like the author really could have written something fantastic.

Mexico: Stories by Josh Barkan is a gritty collection that shines a light on the parts of Mexico that we don't want to talk about. We only want sandy beaches, fruity drinks, tacos and cheap prescription pills. (Kidding)

Josh Barkan takes us to the drug cartels, to illicit love stories, to soldiers, to a high level chef under pressure to impress a drug king. This is the Mexico that Trump's American is scared of. (Again, I'm kidding....kind of.)

Reading short stories are always a little weird. We view slices of life, sometimes without a resolution. As a reader, I almost prefer them. They leave me almost unsatisfied and wanting more. I feel this way about this collection. I want to know about the aftermath. I want to know how families reacted, how people moved on, how lives were changed two weeks later. These aren't happy, fun stories. They are dark, bleak and almost painful to read. I loved it.

Thanks to Blogging for Books, netGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for this review.

I'm a little torn as to how I felt about this book. While Barkan's writing was good and I found the subject fascinating, I expected a wider variation due to the title (an entire country). I appreciated that his characters were different people, but I would have liked more variation in voice and a heads-up that all of the stories were about the effect of drug cartels on their lives. Overall, I think this one would be better read as individual stories with some time between readings, rather than reading through the book in a short time period.

I am quite an enjoyer of short stories and I appreciated reading Barkan's. I thought his stories had a very conversational feel to them, as if I was sitting down face to face with a stranger emptying oneself, wearing their heart on their sleeve, entirely and without filters. One of my favorites to read was "the Painting Professor," in which we hear from the aforementioned, but also from a hustling "street thug;" two men from two different worlds that end up meeting with unfortunate results. "The Escape from Mexico" feels all too real (as almost all of these do), when we see how how a gang's influence embarks a mother & son on a 30 year process to become American citizens. All of these stories are more than just stories because they are happening on a daily basis: kidnapping, gang/cartel violence, fleeing, death. I wish I would have gotten to see more than just the violence.

As you can guess by the title of this book, the short stories found in Mexico by Josh Barkan based and influenced by the culture and violence found in Mexico. To be honest, anthologies either leave me with the feeling of content or a feeling of wishing that there was more. In the case of Mexico, Barkan definitely delivers a storytelling experience that I did not expect.

In Mexico, Barkan provides 12 short stories about "ordinary characters" that are all affected by gang violence. As I was reading this anthology, I found it interesting how the stories gravitate towards the characters all attempting to find peace, amongst influence of the local gang violence in their lives. In fact, I was very pleasantly surprised by how developed each of the characters in the book are, as well as how the stories are loosely linked with each other. Whether it was a brief event or even a profession that was mentioned briefly in each story, I found myself looking for some connections between the stories.

Personally, I found this book to be a fascinating and at times shocking experience. Barkan is very skillful at weaving in the raw and powerful moments of violence with moments of the characters attempting to move beyond their fate. Note, I normally gravitate towards books with minimal violence, but I found myself at times unable to put down the book!

Needless to say, the jarring raw violence is one of the points that I also disliked about the book. I found myself cringing at times from some of the more rawer violent parts of the book.

Despite the parts that I disliked about the book, I found myself continually reaching for Mexico, to see what will happen next in the short story. For those looking for a book full of interesting characters and short stories this will be the book for you. For those that cannot stomach violence in their books and/or looking for 100% happy endings for all the characters, this may not be the one for you.

Disclaimer: I received this book from Blogging for Books and NetGalley in exchange for this honest review at no charge. This post does contain third-party links for convenience. To read my full disclosure policy please go here.

While the characters and the stories are interesting, the constant recurring theme of violence and drug cartels caused all of the different stories to meld into one. Because of this effect, the short stories began to lose their charm. I agree that a collection should have some central theme but the stories themselves had to do with the same things and the same actions, and after a while, there really wasn't anything new being presented. Some of the characters and their experiences left really strong impressions in me, which was definitely a positive thing! I wish this novel wasn't so fixated on the negatives of Mexico; while there are loads of drug cartels, there is also beauty and charm and culture in this country and none of this was really expressed well in this story. So while the characters and the writing style were interesting, the overall collection left me disappointed because of its dismal portrayal of Mexico and its lack of uniqueness between the different short stories.

I received this novel as an advanced copy from Blogging for Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I thought this would be an interesting book and new type of book for me to read, which I am always in the look for, but as things turned out this book wasn't for me.

I found the writing not to be great, or at least not appealing enough for me. The sentences were too long and they felt dense which made them get boring at times. Another problem I had with his writing was the inability he had to write up characters.
First of all, in a couple of stories I was so sure that our protagonist was of the opposite gender that he actually was that you can imagine my confusion when I realized I was wrong...
Secondly, I just didn't feel he knew how to construct a proper character. The protagonists that we find along the different stories just don't seem real, but more like cartoons. I don't think their personalities were defined at all, which made their actions senseless at times.
And lastly he had no clue how to write a proper female character. If I already talked about how I thought he had problems when creating characters, introduce an enphasis for his try outs to create a female one. It was pure chaos.

Some of the stories were really good and entertaining but I found most of them to be mediocre, or at least I had no interest in them. That's why this review has been difficult because I didn't know exactly how to rate or write about it.

Hear the word MEXICO and some sensation reaches your brain. You might get an image of a mariachi band member wearing a sombrero and a smile, the twanging from the guitar slung across the front of his elaborately decorated costume, perhaps? Maybe the taste of tacos or freshly made guacamole and tortilla chips pricks your tastebuds, the smell of the lemon juice a persistent garnish. The rough feel of prickly pears or a desert cactus that your friend brought you back as a souvenir? Whatever sense the name MEXICO invokes for you, we all have some mental association with the place, even if we've never visited the country ourselves.
In this case, MEXICO is the title of Josh Barkan's short story collection, each story as colorful as the cover.
MEXICO: Short story collection by Josh Barkan
Barkan's characters have the kind of experiences most of us don't even conjure up in our fantasies. In the first story, The Chef and El Chapo, an American has opened a restaurant in Mexico City and is visited by the notorious drug kingpin and has to make the meal of his life or risk losing his own.
In the following story, a young Jewish teacher is caught in the crossfire of a modern day Romeo and Juliet story where his students, children of rival mob leaders, have fallen in love, much to the displeasure of their parents, and the teacher is charged with either keeping the teens apart or having his own body hacked apart in revenge.
Wait. What?!?
The stories are engaging and thrilling, ordinary characters trying to live ordinary lives, their days interrupted and made interesting by encounters crime. And even when their responses are a little unbelievable, who's to say what you would do if you ever found yourself in a similar situation. The violence hits you in the face in this book. It is impossible to talk about this book without mentioning how the vivid the descriptions of unspeakable crime in each story. But the major theme is not crime, it is triumph over it, at least for some of the characters. The blackout spots on the cover? Yeah, those are probably from gun shots.
I gave this short story collection a 4 star rating:
Bold, interesting plot lines
Stories progress with good pace
Relatable characters in unexpected situations
I would like to read more from the author and would buy this book myself for my library or as a gift
I took a star off because the crime theme made me wish the stories had a different title. I don't like stereotyping an entire country or its people because of one negative characteristic. I am afraid readers will focus entirely on the violence that probably is correctly portrayed even if this is a work of fiction, and forget about all the other, beautiful experiences the country has to offer.
More information about MEXICO: Stories
Author: Josh Barkan
Format: Hardcover (I read an electronic Advance Reader Copy)
Pages: 256
Publisher: Hogarth
Recently, Hogarth has undertaken a project to publish works based on Shakespeare plays and in the past few months, I've read a few of them - Shylock Is My Name, an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, and Vinegar Girl, a retelling of The Taming of The Shrew. Keeping this in mind, MEXICO short story collection, incorporates many of the themes and even some of the situations that The Bard discussed in his writings so the reader should keep this in mind, figuring out which Shakespeare work is inspiring each story.
I received an electronic copy of MEXICO from Blogging For Books in order to complete this review.

The tone of the opening story reminded me of bad YA and I stopped reading. I might give this another chance after I've finished a mountain of other books or hear more encouraging things, but otherwise I've got not enough time to read better things.

Going into this book, I already had some low expectations. But coming out of it, I recognized that it was hella problematic. One of the warning signs on this book is simply the title, “Mexico”. We know that there is no way a writer, especially a not ownvoices writer can capture the whole variety of a country or city as a whole.

**Disclaimer: I am not of the Mexican ethnicity, I don’t claim to be an expert on this type of representation. This is also not an attack on the author in any way, but on the representation that was presented.**

The way that Mexico City was portrayed was narrow and stereotypical, because all it focused on in every story is crime, gang members, henchmen, drug dealer, etc.(there were derogatory slurs used like “gringo”, “naco”, etc.)
“There are occasional bullets, of course, which most of you “gringos” read about in the papers. I put the word gringos in quotation marks because I know better than to make that kind of slur, but the honest truth is that the way we think about you guys to the north.”

(You know better not to use them, yet you’re admitting us that the “we” are racist.)

“I was shocked when my brother said, ‘Georgie did it’ Georgie was a black boy who lived down the street. ‘Georgie took ‘em. I didn’t do nothin.’ And I didn’t do nothing either. I watched, I observed. I saw him make his racist accusation… As I grew up, I saw the same thing over and over.”

(This character literally admits to doing nothing about it, until he’s like over the age of fifty and then he thinks that one good deed will redeem him.)

There was nothing good, nothing wonderful about the city itself to balance out this constant negative emphasis. To be frank, I think that this book perpetuated negative stereotypes about Mexicans, and that’s harmful and hurtful that minority that might be reading it. In every single story there was a drug cartel highlighted or mentioned, but why and to what end?

Also on the negative representation of women was really harmful, because they were portrayed as victims throughout. There was also only one story that actually featured a woman as the main narrator, which is disappointing because that’s not painting a diverse picture of what Mexico City looks like.

Honestly, we don’t need a story with all white- American characters that have privilege and move to Mexico City with their various professions to live out their life. We don’t need to see yet again another white foreigner/immigrant coming into a country different than his origin of birth and being confused or only selectively seeing the “dark side” of things in the city.

**Thanks to bloggingforbooks and the publisher for giving me a copy in exchange of my honest review**

I'd give this between 3.5 and 4 stars.

Mexico has taken a bit of a bad rap in the last 18 months or so, with Donald Trump using his criticism of Mexican immigrants as a launching pad for his (now-successful) run for the American presidency. Although Mexico has so much more to offer the world—culture, history, beauty, cuisine—all too often people choose instead to dwell on the incidence of crime, drugs, violence, and poverty they see portrayed in the media.

Unfortunately, Josh Barkan's new story collection, aptly titled Mexico, won't really help the country much with its reputation. But like the country itself, these stories are more than you initially think, much more than violence, crime, drugs, and poverty. While not every story works, taken as a whole, this is a powerful collection that makes you think.

The characters in Barkan's stories are, for the most part, ordinary people caught in the midst of extraordinary, and in many cases, unexpected, situations. The choices they choose to make, the decisions they face aren't always the ones we would choose, but they are often shaped by circumstances driven by the country itself.

Some of my favorite stories in this collection were: "The God of Common Names," in which a schoolteacher is caught in the middle of a Romeo-and-Juliet relationship between two of his students, children of rival drug lords, and he finds himself contemplating his own marriage, which caused its own friction; "I Want to Live," which tells of a woman awaiting a doctor's appointment who becomes immersed in the life story of a fellow patient, once a beauty queen and minor celebrity; "The Prison Breakout," about a man working with prison inmates who gets obsessed with the innocence of one prisoner in particular; "The Sharpshooter," which tells of an American soldier and his best friend, involved in a drug sting operation; and "Everything Else is Going to Be Fine," about a driven young man whose involvement in a bizarre incident forces him to confront what he has been hiding.

The stories I liked most tended to be more character-driven than violence-driven, although violence played a role in each. Some stories I felt were more about violence and crime, and didn't seem to ever rise above that. Barkan is a tremendously talented writer who created characters and plots which packed a punch (no pun intended), and made you feel for the situations in which the characters found themselves.

After a while, though, the stories started to feel very similar and very bleak, and the collection became harder to slog through. There were only so many kidnaps and murders and assaults I could read about, and I felt the stories toward the end of the collection became a little more one-note. But then one of the earlier stories would flash through my mind, and I would realize that while this may be an uneven collection, it's a pretty well-written and powerful one, rooted in the reality of today's world.

NetGalley and Crown Publishing provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

These are such a great grouping of stories. Not only are they well written but they are complete in and of themselves, the most complete of any I have lately read. Mexico City, drugs, cartels, shootings, jockeying for positions in the drug trade and regular people trying to live and work amongst all this violence.

What would you do if you were a chef in a restaurant and El Chapo walks in, tells you that you must create a dish using only two ingredients that will be the best dish he had ever tasted. If it isn't he will kill not only you, but everyone dining in your restaurant? Or as as a nurse you are told that due to genetic risks you must have both your breasts amputated, sitting in the doctors office, noticing a beautiful girl who tells her a story about her time as the pawn of a drug dealer? A plastic surgeon, an artist and more. Just regular people who despite running in to these drug lords, manage to find ways to improve and live their lives, something good comes out of tragedy. As I said, such good and interesting stories. Gritty and grim at times, but real.

ARC from Netgalley.

Josh Barkan is an experienced author whom his novels are based off of his experiences in living abroad in foreign countries and are shaped by his interests in politics, history and literature. He also is the author of the book "Blind Speed."
Overall I rated this book three and a half stars out of five. This book was a collection of twelve different stories taken place in Mexico (hence the title). In each of these stories crime and the Mexican drug cartel is the common thread tying these stories together. This was a well written book. Each story was similar yet unique. The stories were told in a way it brought humanity and culture together. Human pain and strength bonded these stories together. I will let you choose which is your favorite story. Mine is "The Prison Breakout."
I want to thank Netgalley, Josh Barkan, and Hogarth: Crown Publishing Group for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

MEXICO: Stories
Josh Barkan
Hogwarth
ISBN 978-1101906293
Hardcover
Fiction

MEXICO is an unforgettable collection of short stories, from its haunting and enigmatic cover (which does exactly what a book cover should do) to the haunting closing sentences of “The Escape from Mexico,” a tale of a mother’s sacrifice in legally immigrating from Mexico to the United States. Author Neal Barkan has with this collection, his second, gathered his stories around a common theme, given that all the stories in this collection take place in or around Mexico City. The protagonists of many of them are not unlike author Josh Barkan, an American by birth who resides in Mexico on a part-time basis. That may well be one element which provides a stark ring of truth to each and every story within its binding. Hopefully, Barkan did not experience any of the events which take place in the MEXICO stories; sadly, someone almost certainly did.

The stories in MEXICO speak with many different voices. A high school teacher in “The God of Common Names” attempts to save the lives of two of his students whose romantic assignations have put them in the middle of a crossfire between two drug cartels. “The Kidnapping” is told through the voice of an artist who is kidnapped off of the street in Mexico City and subjected to senseless violence, yet somehow manages to achieve an epiphany. An incarceration of another sort is the theme of “The Prison Breakout,” in which a man risks everything he has in order to rescue a man accused of a robbery and murder which he did not commit. In “The American Journalist,” meanwhile, a story with a chance reference comes back to haunt a reporter in the worst way when he becomes the object of the wrath of a local, corrupt, and somewhat insane politician as the result. The shifting sides of law enforcement are highlighted in “The Sharpshooter,” where a skilled sniper finds his beliefs challenged by a betrayal and an official order which he feels he cannot, and should not, carry out.
My favorite story in the collection, after some consideration, is “The Chef and El Chapo,” wherein a chef’s gourmet restaurant is subjected to a visit from a notorious cartel leader, who gives the chef an almost impossible task in the form of an ultimatum. Some of the story (as with many in this collection) is cringe-inducing, though only momentarily. It is almost a parable in its way, though it can be appreciated on its own merits without digging too deeply into the sub-strata of its meaning. “I Want to Live” is a close second. A woman, contemplating radical surgery as a potential lifesaving measure, encounters another patient whose beauty she envies. The story that is subsequently told results in a fateful decision as well as a revelation that echoes throughout the rest of MEXICO.

I am seeing more short story collections of late, a state of events which I hope will encourage more potential readers, perhaps put off by the time commitment which a full length novel demands, to come back to the book stores and libraries. MEXICO would certainly be a place for such readers to begin. By turns frightening, somber, and yes, occasionally uplifting, MEXICO is a collection to be read and re-read. Recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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I don't have a clue why this short story collection has low ratings. Did readers think they were going to read about beach vacations and tasty food? Personally, I thought this collection was really original, engaging, and clever -- it's a bit gritty but it's not over the top. I have read quite a few short story collections lately, and was frustrated by some collections because the stories felt like repetitive variations of the same story -- not so with Mexico. Some stories focus on Americans living in Mexico, while others are about Mexicans with a connection to the US. There is a chef forced to cook for a drug lord, an architect who picks the wrong client to try to impress his father, a teenager who's mother goes to extraordinary lengths to protect her son from gang violence, etc... Life is not easy for these characters -- drug crime and economic inequality create an ever present edge -- but the stories are not gratuitous or sensationalistic. These feel like real people, functioning in a world that has much to offer but that is ever shaky because of the threat of violence and corruption caused by drug trafficking. I would recommend Mexico to anyone who likes short stories with an edge that takes readers out of their comfort zone. I would be happy to read Barkan's next book and hope this one gets the positive attention it deserves. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.