“Sentimental and ferocious, upsetting and render, firmly magic-realist yet utterly modern…. Sáenz is a writer with greatness in him.”
—LUIS URREA, San Diego Union-Tribune
“Sáenz is wonderful, at times magnificent.”
—Baltimore Sun
“A powerful and poetic novel…. Demonstrates a perceptive novelist’s knowledge of those deeper, interior rhythms that somehow propel us, at times in beauty and at times in tortured patterns, across the surface of the earth.”
—Albuquerque Journal
“Carry Me like Water is indeed a lovely first novel, rich in its sense of place and people. Benjamin Alire Sáenz has a fine talent.”
—LARRY MCMURTRY, author of Terms of Endearment
“Carry Me Like Water is full of love, loathing, and a cacophony of characters which people the spiritual airwaves from El Paso to California. Certainly a new perspective in the Chicano novel.”
—RUDOLFO ANAYA, author of Bless Me, Ultima
“Benjamin Sáenz has created, with his first novel, a work of unique and endearing quality. The characters and conflicts appear as in no other book I’ve read. There is a well-wrought and compelling ferment of pain and pathos, the familiar with the supernatural, the poetic with plot.”
—LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ,
author of Always Running and Music of the Mill