There is love between Luis Alberto Urrea and the things he writes about in Six Kinds of Sky but it is not a blind love: it is a love that sees fully, a love expressed through writing that shares without holding back. In the stories, constructed with clear, simple sentences (even in dream sequence), the truth is allowed to come forward and knock us sideways with its beauty, its harshness, and its sorrow.  And always Urrea offers us the appeasement of joy: small treasures of moments of happiness or safety or unlimited possibility. Even when the moment passes, the memory holds for the character of the story: they are sustained by it, and so are we.

These stories radiate out from the center of the universe, the town of Rosario in Mexico.  Either set in this very genuine but still magical place where real characters from Urrea’s life expand in his fiction to grand portraits of dreamers, scoundrels, lovers, and cretins, or populated with Rosarians set loose in the world, or just carrying the tang and scent of Rosario in the telling, all the stories draw from and build on Rosario.

The stories run from sweet humor and fantasy to dry humor and desolation to bitter humor and loss of innocence to deep misery and survival to stunning loss fought by holding memory, and finally, to the aching of sorrow: the universe of circumstances, and the universality of the human response.  We are not the impoverished of Tijuana picking through garbage dumps to eke out a living, yet we are one with them when we read Urrea’s “A Day in the Life”.  All of his stories are like that: so familiar in the emotions, no matter how strange or unknown the situation.  It is the familiar that draws us in, it is the unknown being exposed to us that leave us marked.  The stories do leave a mark.

In his Afterword, Urrea writes “these tales are really about grace…. Grace versus Fate.”  These stories are about the possibility of humanity: the saving grace.