THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607220213
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
LENGTH: 64 lines
STREETS OF FIRE
SOLEDAD SANTIAGO
Dutton. 342 pp. $23.95.
Single parent. Dutiful daughter. Career-minded cop. Hispanic.
Francesca Colon is all of these things. Soledad Santiago's new novel, Streets of Fire, explores how the varying strands of Colon's identity weave a character who's emblematic of many women in the 1990s.
When the book opens, Colon has just been promoted from beat cop to the public information department of the New York City police. It's a job for which she has worked fiercely and she is determined to succeed at it.
Change is also imminent in Colon's personal life, as her children enter the firestorms of adolescence. Reflects Colon, ``I was 38, no longer young and not yet old. It seemed I had been a single parent since forever. That year, though, my children were ripening into adulthood and my life - my own life - was threatening to begin.''
Colon's new post thrusts her into the heat of the city's restlessness. Police officers kill a young man from the Dominican Republic while trying to arrest him, and Hispanic neighborhoods in Washington Heights go on a rampage. Top brass assign Colon to handle the Spanish-language media covering the riots.
While she's giving a television interview at the scene, another youth dies at the hands of the police. These developments cause her to question whether she has sacrificed ethics for career and lead to the book's ultimate dilemma - what will Colon say in front of a grand jury about what she has witnessed?
The explosiveness of Washington Heights reflects the tension in Colon's private life. Her daughter returns home from studying flamenco dancing in Madrid and announces she is pregnant. Her son begins to skip school and to search for the drug-using father who abandoned the family many years earlier.
Colon's mother, hospitalized with a heart attack, requires surgery and her daughter's care. And after long submerging her own emotional needs in her children's, Colon finds herself attracted to a flamboyant attorney. ``I was lonely to point of pain, hungry for a loving touch, terrified of consequences, and wondering: `Was he one more variation on a theme? . . . different job, different politics, but the same man under the skin, the one who, in the end, would betray my trust.''
While these events may seem the stuff of a potboiler, the protagonist is so likable and level-headed that she convincingly expresses the concerns held by many women, regardless of careers and backgrounds.
Streets of Fire conveys a wonderful sense of place as Colon moves about the Hispanic neighborhoods of the city: She chats with a friend over a cup of cafe con leche, buys a fresh coconut from a street vendor and cracks it open for a snack, and, at her mother's insistence, visits a herbalist to purchase a ritual bath to ensure good luck for her heart surgery.
Santiago has worked in the press offices of the New York State Attorney General and the New York State Comptroller. There's an air of authenticity to her descriptions of the police department's public information division, with its clipboards of incident reports and VCRs that record every newscast in the city for review the next day. And, like her protagonist, Santiago raised two children as a single parent in New York. Her fourth novel presents a voice that's fresh, readable and clearly speaks from experience. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of
public relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk. by CNB