PIECES OF THE HEART: New Chicano Fiction...

PIECES OF THE HEART: New Chicano Fiction edited by Gary Soto (Chronicle Books: $10.95; 178 pp., paperback original). Most of the 15 new stories in this collection focus on family relationships and questions of divided identity. In Jack Lopez’s “Easy Time,” a young man sulks when his relatives fail to throw a party for his first jail sentence. “Enero,” by Mary Helen Ponce, offers an affecting portrait of a young mother burdened with too many children. The characters in Carlos Flores’ “Smeltertown” struggle to forge conflicting ethnic traditions into a unified sense of self, while an Americanized man travels to Mexico to discover the eerie secrets of his ancestors in Guy Garcia’s haunting “La Promessa.” A valuable if somewhat uneven overview of an important group of emerging voices.