Book review: ‘Forgetting the Alamo’

Emma Pérez’s award-winning historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory falls within the tradition of this kind of revenge story, but only in the way that, say, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice falls within the tradition of detective fiction. It’s is a delightfully playful deconstruction of the narratives used by Anglo-Americans to justify colonization, a deadly serious rumination on the consequences of that colonization, and, not least by anyone’s standards, an explosive adventure tale.