Joseph Arellano's Page

Here is a summary of the book, The 5E's of Potter's Field. Your opinion would be valuable.
In 1991, Mrs. Hazel Green, a seventy-one year old woman, living in apartment 5E in a south Bronx tenement, died. She had lived in that three-room apartment for almost half a century. When I went to clear it out, I was astounded by what I found there...the woman had stacks of paper in every room of the house almost as if she had saved every piece of paper with which she had come in contact. This included a journal she had kept, the diaries of a daughter, letters that crossed continents, magazines, newspapers, ticket stubs, rent receipts, food coupons, report cards, political and religious brochures, checks...all of which defined a fifty-year period of time. The paper told a story of three children and a widowed mother, who in different ways tried to escape 5E and the poverty into which they were born. The 5E’s of Potter’s Field is loosely based upon that paper and recreates the lives of the children people who grew up in its dark cavern with the mother who was never able to model love for them. The story asks what happens to people growing up in a loveless environment entrenched in a society that favors indifference and mediocrity and fails to understand the worth in human connections. Do they become drug addicts as the son did? Do they endure a life shielding themselves from emotion as the sisters? Sydney Green, the middle daughter, tells the story of the occupants of 5E. We follow her thirty year struggle with the poverty, and the physical and mental abuse of 5E as she wanders on an idealistic journey through Broncksland, her name for the Bronx, West Africa, the inner city of Los Angeles, a small town in California, an Indian reservation out west, before finally returning to the place she found her greatest peace, West Africa. The novel begins in Sierra Leone during the civil war and details her lifelong struggle with love, guilt and shame while trying to prove herself worthy of the crapshoot...being born. It is set against the sweeping panorama of 50 years of history, following the madness in the world and the madness in Sydney Green.

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