The Last Karankawas, Kimberly Garza
The Last Karankawas, Kimberly Garza
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
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The Last Karankawas
A Novel

Author: Kimberly Garza

Narrator: Adriana Sananes, André Santana, Becca Q. Co, Reggie De Leon

Unabridged: 9 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/09/2022


Synopsis

"Debut author Garza skillfully links brilliantly crafted episodes to create an unforgettable community in Galveston, TX...Indeed, staying well-tuned to Garza’s work earns enduring rewards."
— Booklist (starred review)

"These rich performances, a chorus of different tones and accents, create a beautiful tapestry of a complicated city and the people who call it home." - AudioFile Magazine

"Beautiful, complex, and subversive, The Last Karankawas is an important book about Texas from a powerful new voice in American fiction. I loved it." —Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times bestselling author of Valentine

A blazing and kaleidoscopic debut about a tight-knit community of Mexican and Filipino American families on the Texas coast from a voice you won't soon forget.

Welcome to Galveston, Texas. Population 50,241.

A popular tourist destination and major shipping port, Galveston attracts millions of visitors each year. Yet of those who come to drink by the beach, few stray from the boulevards to Fish Village, the neighborhood home to individuals who for generations have powered the island.

Carly Castillo has only ever known Fish Village. Her grandmother claims that they descend from the Karankawas, an indigenous Texas people once believed to be extinct, thereby tethering them to Galveston. But as Carly ages, she begins to imagine a life elsewhere, undefined by her family’s history. Meanwhile, her boyfriend and all-star shortstop turned seaman, Jess, treasures the salty, familiar air. He’s gotten chances to leave Galveston for bigger cities with more possibilities. But he didn’t take them then, and he sure as hell won’t now. When word spreads of a storm gathering strength offshore, building into Hurricane Ike, each Galveston resident must make a difficult decision: board up the windows and hunker down or flee inland and abandon their hard-won homes.

Moving through these characters’ lives and those of the extraordinary individuals who circle them, Kimberly Garza's The Last Karankawas weaves together a multitude of voices to present a lyrical, emotionally charged portrait of everyday survival. The result is an unforgettable exploration of familial inheritance, human resilience, and the histories we assign to ourselves, reminding us that the deepest bonds are forged not by blood, but by fire.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company

About Kimberly Garza

Kimberly Garza is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas, where she earned a PhD in 2019. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Creative Nonfiction, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. A native Texan—born in Galveston, raised in Uvalde—she is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The Last Karankawas is her first novel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jenny on July 19, 2022

A really good slice-of-life sort of novel about a community of Mexican And Filipino American families in Galveston as Hurricane Ike builds offshore. I was a little overwhelmed with this book at first because there were so many perspectives in it, but then I started reading it as a collection of sho......more

Goodreads review by Mai on August 16, 2023

$1.99 US Kindle sale......more

Goodreads review by Kate The Book Addict on May 01, 2022

Thanks to Holt Publishing for my ARC copy of this great book for a fair review of Dr. Kimberly Garza’s mesmerizing book THE LAST KARANKAWAS on sale in August 2022. (Yes, this author is a PhD with lyrical writing skills—a brilliant woman we’d all love to have coffee with.) Come along on this free vac......more

Goodreads review by Jill on April 05, 2022

I had a hard time getting into this book. There were too many characters to keep track of. When the hurricane hit, I expected a bigger story. The story takes place in Galveston, Texas, and the surrounding areas, so if readers are from there or like reading about Texas, this might be an interesting b......more

Goodreads review by Randi on April 20, 2022

I received an ARC of this book from Henry Holt & Co. I definitely had a love/hate relationship with this one. It's pretty light on the plot, with one main plot point being the buildup to Hurricane Ike, but even that was over in two chapters before moving onto a few chapters of 'clean up'. It felt li......more