A chilling mystery: two separate love stories become intertwined in a military conspiracy to conceal the traumatic death of a scientist threatening to reveal the origin of a tragic pandemic. Led by the allegory of a poem, her lover goes cross-country to seek revenge.
Tujunga is a chilling murder mystery that raises the possibility of a government cover up to protect the integrity of the United States space exploration program. At the center of this scientific thriller are two very different love stories that play out in heartbreaking detail as the full scope of a young scientist's mysterious death is revealed.
What transpires between the central characters of Tujunga in their quest for answers will surprise you at every turn. It's a novel full of shocking revelations about the world of space and science that also documents the societal constraints some American heroes faced in the 20th century. Astronaut Curt McKillon will impress you and break your heart, all at the same time.
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Reviews for "Tujunga"
Reviewed by Michael Hartnett
4/30/2018
A Daring Novel that Delivers
Tujunga by Carlos Alvarado is a rich, daring, and exciting novel. Alvarado has weaved an eloquent and emotionally powerful narrative that tells an American story in all its beauty and corruptions. Bounding across time and space, Tujunga connects the genetic investigations by Xochi Arias in 2005 Los Angeles to the space program thirty years prior. Her discoveries may have led her death, and the inquiries of her fiancé Robert force him to confront grave dangers and dark secrets about the past.
Alvarado artfully intertwines into this more contemporary plotline the story of Curt McKillon and his wife Claudia. Their courtship in Fayetteville, West Virginia and the trials and tribulations of their marriage are lovingly detailed as Alvarado shows an assured hand of capturing intense moments that deeply invest the reader. While the narratives of Xochi and Robert’s urgent present and Curt and Claudia’s evocative past are knitted seamlessly, Alvarado punctuates his terse scenes with vignettes that linger in the reader’s consciousness (“With a glance up at the tall ceiling and across the long foyer, Curt felt the impact of his father’s preferred adjective for Claudia’s neighborhood: illusory”). What happened recently to Xochi and what happened to Curt all those years earlier become compelling mysteries that drive the narrative. A book of poems that link the two is fitting for a novel for the comfortably soars with stirring passages even as the clear-eyed vision of what characters confront keeps the work grounded.
The theme of forbidden territory is explored in original ways throughout. Xochi’s genetic research leads her to revelations that have grave consequences; Curt’s initial relationship with Claudia is established on such transgressions, and the intensity of their intimacy makes the later admissions of unexpected passions even more surprising. Alvarado wisely focuses on the coping with these forbidden feelings (“Silence is a journey/on which duty is sustained”) and offering them intriguing manifestations through geography. Whether in the Mohave Desert, the coal mines of West Virginia, the jungles of Gambia, or even the dark side of the Moon, Tujunga plots courses that simultaneously mark the growth of Curt even as they signal a Grecian sense of impending tragedy.
And on this journey, Alvarado carries the reader along with plot points that effortlessly jump across time and a literary style that is sly and suggestive: “John described a peanut sauce fish meal as a local delicacy—an order Curt begrudged making when he noticed the attendant run up the alley they had traveled and return with two fish heads peering out of a rolled up newspaper.”
Essentially, Tujunga tells an American story of a half century (1955-2005) that captures much of the wonder of the possibilities of the space program, one that directly is contradicted by the close-minded sensibilities that rendered the society often woefully repressed. Alvarado’s novel is literature of the highest order. Tujunga is filled with writing, plot turns, and ideas that are risky and provocative. It is an entertaining mystery that fires a reader’s imagination and makes him rethink what he thought he knew. Tujunga receives my highest recommendation.
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