The Affairs of the Falcóns
​Melissa Rivero

Photo by Bartosz Potocki

A cold and unwelcoming New York City sets the stage in this domestic drama about an undocumented Peruvian woman struggling to keep her family and shattered American dream from falling to pieces. 

Ana, her husband Lucho, and two children are living with relatives in New York while between apartments. They immigrated from Peru without papers, and Lucho has only recently found a new job as a taxi driver with the night shift. However, tension fills the air as Lucho's relative, Valeria, is not a very generous host. 

Valeria, like many of Lucho's relatives from Lima, believe that he married down when he agreed to wedAna, who is from provincial Peru. Rivero accurately depicts the simmering tensions and prejudices between Limenos and individuals with a strong indigenous background from other regions: often masked as an urban-country divide, they reflect the thorny remnants of colonialism. 

Ana, like many immigrants in the US, is forced to borrow money from an informal loan shark named Mama and then Mama's even shadier husband. Ana then faces two important choices and has to ask herself just how much her American dream - and an apartment of her own - is worth. 

Rivero shows an immigrant community often overlooked in the current political climate that focuses on the US-Mexico border. She also depicts the grim reality of leaving behind a somewhat comfortable if tenuous middle class life in your home country to come perform manual labor jobs for wages that rarely cover skyrocketing rents in the US. Likewise, the novel shows the precarious place of all immigrants in America today. 

An often gripping window into the desperate choices immigrants must make to hold things together.

Melissa Rivero was born in Lima, Peru and raised in Brooklyn. Her writing has taken her to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the VONA/Voices Workshops, and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. In 2015, Melissa was an Emerging Writers Fellow at the Center for Fiction. She is a graduate of NYU and Brooklyn Law School, and currently works as in-house legal counsel at a startup.

The Affairs of the Falcóns is publication by ECCO  / HarperCollins. Click here to purchase.
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Reviewed by
Elliott Turner​
​6/5/2019

Elliott Turner's fiction has appeared in Apogee Journal, Transect Mag, Vol. 1: Brooklyn, Azahares, Barren Magazine, & countless others. His debut novel, The Night of the Virgin, was an Int'l Latino Book Award finalist. He is a contributing editor at Latino Book Review and lives in Texas.

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