Martínez, author of ¡Caramba! (2004), was born in San José, California, the only child of a first generation Mexican-American father, and an American mother of Germanic descent. A high school dropout with a college degree, she is a third-generation flea-marketeer. Some of her earliest and fondest memories are of accompanying her Mexican grandmother to sell at the flea market. The flea-market gene seemed to have skipped a generation, but Nina Marie was recently able to recapture the lost generation by setting her retired father up with a gig selling her auction rejects at a local flea market where he is known around town as “The Purse Guy” aka “El Señor de las Bolsas.” Selling mostly vintage and designer finds at flea markets and online for the last twenty years has provided some of the fodder for her forthcoming novel, Swap Meet, about a girl who visits the county dump her first full day of life (it was on the way home from the hospital), has a horrible childhood, then grows up to be the queen of the swap meet.
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¡Caramba!A Novel
Javier was crazy about tacos. He loved them the way some men love their women: a nice, hard, firm shell. While many men have fallen to the wayside on account of a woman, it is hard to imagine a taco unraveling a man the way it did Javier. After simple surgery to remove a cyst from his gallbladder, one of Javier’s friends snuck him a couple of hard-shelled tacos. He propped himself up in his bed, the green of his hospital pajamas matching the lettuce in his taco, smiled wide, and dug in. After a good meal, he thanked the Lord for his many blessings, including such good friends, then laid himself down to sleep never to wake again. The taco shell had ripped his stitches as it went down.
¡Caramba!:A Novel -
¡Caramba!A Novel
What made April May Miss Magma for so long wasn’t beauty or even her funny name. (Miss Magma had stuck her head out into the world at 11:59 p.m. one April the thirtieth, but it wasn’t until 12:00 a.m. May the first that she had fully exited the birth canal.) It was April May’s hair that made her so hot. She had the brightest, reddest hair in all of Lava County. So, when the would-be float-riding, crowd-waving, tiara-wearing, bikini-clad contestants came out and strutted their augmented stuff, the judges were less than impressed. Sure, the ladies later appeared in the panel’s private thoughts, but it looked like no one could dethrone April May as queen of Lava County. There was something about all that red hair spilling out of the crater and onto the side of the volcano float every year during the Lava County Labor Day Parade that got the judges every time.
¡Caramba!:A Novel -
¡Caramba!A Novel
There was a sadness in the way a man always fell asleep before Lulabell, leaving her all alone, sad and lonely, with nothing to do but think about the difference between the two, and wonder if there was one at all. Inevitably she always concluded the same thing, that all sadness was the result of one thing: loneliness.
But that night and that man were different. She was neither sad, nor lonely, and even though they had already made love, Beto was wide awake.
¡Caramba!:A Novel
“Endlessly inventive . . . very funny. Martínez’s deadpan perspective on faith, romance and the uneasy bonds of family is truly wonderful.” —The Washington Post Book World [on ¡Caramba!]
“An absurdly entertaining first novel . . . With a born-again mariachi and his witchcraft practicing mother, a vixen recently jailed for her involvement in moving tamales stuffed with mala hierba, a beautician who’s part mamacita, part papacito, and a volcano that could blow at any moment, ¡Caramba! is a dizzying Mexican hat dance . . . " —Los Angeles Times
“A triumph of whimsy and imagination—Monty Python meets 100 Years of Solitude.” —The San Francisco Chronicle [on ¡Caramba!]
"May be the most entertaining, hilarious and thoroughly enjoyable reading experience many folks will have this year." —St. Petersburg Times [on ¡Caramba!]