A friend of mine who moved to Seattle after college in Ohio in the early 1980s told me then that the newspaper there printed a surprising number of wire copy from Florida. This was before Florida became known as a reliable source of nuttiness. My friend deduced that the reason was that Florida was physically about as far as you can get from Seattle and still be in the United States, and people there dressed differently, did different things for fun, and ate different food.
 That reasoning was a part of why I liked [a:Luis Alberto Urrea|52458|Luis Alberto Urrea|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1669673026p2/52458.jpg]'s [b:The House of Broken Angels|40603634|The House of Broken Angels|Luis Alberto Urrea|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529592536l/40603634.SY75.jpg|57042177] as much as I did. I live in a Philadelphia suburb and I've never been to San Diego, where Angels takes place. The book is about Mexican immigrants. I don't know one person from Mexico.
 That's certainly not the only reason I liked it, though. The story is a lively and compelling one, heart rending at times, very funny at others, and brims with life and intelligence. There are a fair number of Spanish words in it, and they're the kind of words my high school Spanish teacher didn't teach us, but you'll know what's going on, and if you want to you can just put the words in a search engine for a quick translation.
 If I had to name a problem with it, it would be that there are a lot of secondary characters to keep track of and several of them go by different names to different people. But I admit that I'm bad at keeping track of fictional characters. Very bad at it, in fact.