The stories in Patricia Engel's debut collection, "Vida," chart the scattered moments, fractured connections and unrealized desires that merge to form the contours of her character's lives. At the center of it all is Sabina, a daughter of Colombian immigrants, who navigates between the various cultural and emotional forces that seek to define her in a kind of personal diaspora set to the backdrop of the contemporary Latino immigrant experience. Hers is a coming-of-age story that eschews grand narrative arcs in favor of a more collage-like depiction of life, one in which various fragments of experience coalesce to form some semblance of a whole. The effect is a richer and more honest depiction of human experience than one often finds in contemporary fiction, as if by refusing to try and tell the whole story of Sabina, we come to know her more fully through the silences and the spaces between the telling.
Throughout the course of these stories, Sabina travels from the suburbs of New Jersey, through the urban landscapes of New York and Miami, to the teeming streets of Bogot