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Title: Taxi Rojo: A Tijuana Tale

Author: Erik Orrantia

Narrator: J.D. Huntington

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-27-16

Publisher: Lethe Press

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Tijuana: melting pot of Mexico, gateway to Baja California. Two million souls struggle for survival, each searching for a way to become...something, anything better.

Fate brings a few strangers together one night in a crowded taxi rojo. When the red taxi crashes down a canyon, it creates a connection between the passengers that, like the international border within sight of the crash, draws a line between triumph and defeat, hopelessness and perseverance, life and death.

Boyfriends Rigo and Cristian confront their demons when a supposedly innocuous tryst gets out of control. Pancha looks for love in a complex world of ambiguous gender and sexual identity. Toni's biggest problem is self-acceptance in a culture that has ingrained in him the idea that real men are macho and self-sufficient. Julia's faith is challenged, as she toils to make a living and support her disabled sister, while feeling paralyzed by her sense of responsibility and lingering guilt.

Even in Tijuana, light can be found in the darkness.

Members Reviews:

I really enjoyed this story and did not put it down until I finished.

The story follows survivors of a deadly, overcrowded, taxi accident in Tijuana for two months after the tragedy. The author's writing style is compelling. I find his knowledge of life in this border city is captivating. Somehow, in this short story, we care about the characters, their strengths, their imperfections, their trials and their courage and humanity. Would love a sequel.

Really good story

I enjoyed the first novel by this writer and eagerly purchased this one. I thought it was wonderful, but please be warned it is not a romance by any stretch of imagination. I guess if I were to summarise it, I would say that it is about the characters who act as close to real people as it could possibly be written about, it is about characters who have to work hard for every shred of comfort in their lives and get paid mere pennies. It is about a catastrophic event which brought together an ensemble cast, and forced different problems in their lives even more out of the open. The characters are not romanticised, their lives are not romanticized, but they felt sympathetic and likeable to me, even if they made mistakes, wrong choices. I liked how the writer juggled several stories which were connected, but still were about totally different people, it did not feel disjointed to me at all. Even though the book is not a romance, there were several love stories in it, gay and straight and I liked them all.

South of the Border

In the style of Thornton Wilder's classic The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the novel uses a tragic disaster - in this case, the crash of one of Tijuana's route taxis, the eponymous red taxi of the title - to link together the stories of a diverse group of characters. Like the ripples in a stream, the consequences of the taxi crash continue to radiate out into the lives of the survivors.

Orrantia's strength as a writer is in his ability to conjure up ordinary people struggling with their own personal, and often prosaic, problems-a young gay couple sorting out issues of fidelity, a latent homosexual struggling with his identity, a good-hearted but overtaxed woman trying to care for her family, a drag queen finding love where he least expects it - Clearly these are not earth shattering matters, but they are of a sort with which most of us can identify.