What do you think?
Rate this book
Luz at Midnight
Deeply embedded in the landscapes of South Texas, Luz at Midnight tells the story of an ill-timed love that unfolds in the time of climate change. Booksmart but naïve, Citlali Sanchez-O’Connor has just been hired to organize a San Antonio campaign against “gleaning,” a controversial new mining practice that promises a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. In the process, she soon encounters Joel Champlain, a journalist struggling to hide his manic-depression as he uncovers the corrupt politics that surround gleaning. During a chance trip together to Texas’s Gulf Coast, Lali is struck by a love as powerful and sudden as the electrical storm that birthed Luz, the unearthly canine trickster who has thrown them together. But Lali—married with a baby, poised to leave town for an academic job, and trained to think everything is explicable—finds she must decide what their connection means, if anything, for a path already set in motion.
A genre-hopping narrative that layers story with reporting, poetry, scholarship, and teatro, Luz questions the nature of desire and power, asking: What throws us into the path of those we love, and what pulls us apart? What agency powers the universe—and do we have any agency of our own to create a world different from the one powerful others have planned for us? Along the way of considering these questions, Luz is about the humorous (and not-so-humorous) inner workings of the nonprofit industrial complex; about Newtonian and Quantum theory; about birds and about dogs. It is also about what we call mental illness, and the possibility that love may be pathology, while madness may open some important window into the nature of reality.
A genre-hopping narrative that layers story with reporting, poetry, scholarship, and teatro, Luz questions the nature of desire and power, asking: What throws us into the path of those we love, and what pulls us apart? What agency powers the universe—and do we have any agency of our own to create a world different from the one powerful others have planned for us? Along the way of considering these questions, Luz is about the humorous (and not-so-humorous) inner workings of the nonprofit industrial complex; about Newtonian and Quantum theory; about birds and about dogs. It is also about what we call mental illness, and the possibility that love may be pathology, while madness may open some important window into the nature of reality.
- GenresFiction
446 pages, Paperback
First published December 14, 2020
10 people are currently reading
1415 people want to read
About the author
Marisol Cortez
4 books23 followersI write across genre about place, power, and the possibilities proliferating at the margins for all the other borderwalking weirdos out there. Author of Luz at Midnight, available from FlowerSong Press (flowersongpress.com/books-1/p/luzatmi...), and co-editor of Deceleration (deceleration.news). C'mon, lemme write you: mcortez.net/contact
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 13, 2021
‘Luz at Midnight’ Reimagines Blackouts, Polar Vortexes, and Environmental Justice in San Antonio
Texas Observer
Nic Yeager
In the not-too-distant future, San Antonio is scrambling to go carbon neutral. They’re turning refineries into apartments and closing coal plants to build mixed-use developments. But progress is slow. Poor people are being displaced, left vulnerable in a time of increasingly frequent heat waves and extreme weather events. All the while, profiteers are seizing on the vacuum left by the fossil fuel industry to vulture minerals from the South Texas landscape. In an unequal transition away from fossil fuels, could this be the future?
In her debut novel, San Antonio-based author Marisol Cortez teases out this scenario, documenting environmental politics in San Antonio through a lens that’s half-real, half-hypothetical. From small South Texas publisher FlowerSong Press, Luz at Midnight unfolds from the vantage point of Chicano community activists including the soft-spoken but steadfast protagonist Citlali Sanchez-O’Connor (Lali for short). The story follows Lali as she works long hours for an environmental nonprofit between academic jobs and finds herself in a whirlwind of utility rate hikes, political theatre, and artistic grassroots protest. Lali’s job is organizing actions at City Council meetings and canvassing for signatures to fight a utility rate hike after a huge storm—a storm that resulted in “rolling blackouts” (hint: they weren’t really rolling) in lower-income neighborhoods. Cortez says she based these scenes on the Texas polar vortex of 2011, but as I read her book in my darkened Austin home in February, they felt shockingly prescient. Her idea of rare earth mines in South Texas, too, is also partly coming true: One of the first rare earth processing facilities in the United States is opening in Hondo.
“I wanted to make up a speculative but entirely plausible near-future scenario that would allow me to take elements from struggles I had actually been involved in,” Cortez told the Observer, noting that she wrote most of the book during the Obama years, when federal legislation to push cities to decarbonize first seemed possible. The premise of the book is engaging, but it’s not a plot-heavy read: Cortez’s writing style is experimental and sometimes dense, more likely to include a mini-essay than a moment of high drama. She often riffs on intriguing concepts that would be better categorized as cultural studies than fiction, from recounting the Hispanicization of Ya Gna Wena, the traditional name given to the San Antonio River by the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe, to musing on the parallels between academic study and monastic life.
By exploring the poetics of land, labor, and social movements in more descriptive terms, Luz offers a wealth of insights on environmental justice in San Antonio. Rich, lyrical prose constantly refers back to power itself, calling our attention to the forces that shape us: “Something in me had broken open—like the hidden gas line beneath that old refinery, severed by a hapless construction crew, tripping an explosion that spelled out the end of an era. … For some reason I didn’t understand, it was Joel who had that power, who awakened a longing so wide and deep it crashed to my surface like oil or water, creating a river unaffordable, a shallow sea.”
In the thick of Lali’s fight against the utility rate hike, she’s compelled by a powerful desire toward independent journalist Joel Champlain, who uncovers city scandals around a controversial new mining practice called “gleaning.” Desire is a central theme; Luz invites us to treat it with critical attention. “Somewhere, someone had written that it is desire that powers the universe,” Cortez writes early on, calling the mother of all things “longing herself, the longing to be.” A respect for women’s stories about the liberating nature of desire, sexuality, and romantic love makes the book feel like a work of feminist theory at times, too. As the novel meanders along its path, we meet such fascinating characters as the radical nun Sister Soledad, who says erotic love shook her open to liberation theology and political struggle.
Joel and Lali and the rest of the “movement people”—the term favored by Cortez for the loose network of activists and volunteers they associate with—fight several battles at the city level. Cortez honors their often-unsuccessful struggles against problems understood to reflect centuries of history: One short essay places “contemporary power relations in San Antonio within a historical timeline that stretches back to the city’s roots in Spanish colonial rule,” and traces how predominantly wealthy, white residents have long controlled city politics. When an older Chicana activist from the fictional group VAMOS teaches Lali how to canvass, she ties utility rate hikes back to fights decades earlier against unequal, segregationist budget allocations for streets and drainage. “Why do you think we’re called VAMOS, anyway!” the elder says. “We’re viejas [old ladies] against more of the same!”
By leaning into her genre-bending writing style, Cortez creates something that feels like an epic poem at times and archival research or oral history at others. She draws from a local’s lifelong knowledge of San Antonio, from neighborhood lore, and from political history, such as in an essay on former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, the first Hispanic mayor of a major U.S. city, dubbed “King Henry from the Block.” At other times, though, the writing offers too few details. Especially at the beginning: Long sections on nature and abstract forces are hard to latch onto, and linger in a hazy, imprecise realm for too long. Still, this is a small price to pay for a wildly ambitious work. On the whole, the book, with its unexpected rhythms, is captivating.
Luz at Midnight revels in the particularities of San Antonio to uncover the very nature of extractive energy production, of capitalism and colonialism. The book argues that these things form the root of our problems, not the solution. Rather than continuing to invest in “a kind of development that impoverishes our communities,” and turning to technological solutions, Cortez shows that there has to be another way. Luz doesn’t exactly offer an optimistic view—as organizers know, you fail and you fail and you fail in the fight for environmental and economic justice—but it does help us remember everything that many neglected communities still have in abundance: ancestral knowledge, love, passion, resolve, and longing, all of which offer their own kind of power.
Texas Observer
Nic Yeager
In the not-too-distant future, San Antonio is scrambling to go carbon neutral. They’re turning refineries into apartments and closing coal plants to build mixed-use developments. But progress is slow. Poor people are being displaced, left vulnerable in a time of increasingly frequent heat waves and extreme weather events. All the while, profiteers are seizing on the vacuum left by the fossil fuel industry to vulture minerals from the South Texas landscape. In an unequal transition away from fossil fuels, could this be the future?
In her debut novel, San Antonio-based author Marisol Cortez teases out this scenario, documenting environmental politics in San Antonio through a lens that’s half-real, half-hypothetical. From small South Texas publisher FlowerSong Press, Luz at Midnight unfolds from the vantage point of Chicano community activists including the soft-spoken but steadfast protagonist Citlali Sanchez-O’Connor (Lali for short). The story follows Lali as she works long hours for an environmental nonprofit between academic jobs and finds herself in a whirlwind of utility rate hikes, political theatre, and artistic grassroots protest. Lali’s job is organizing actions at City Council meetings and canvassing for signatures to fight a utility rate hike after a huge storm—a storm that resulted in “rolling blackouts” (hint: they weren’t really rolling) in lower-income neighborhoods. Cortez says she based these scenes on the Texas polar vortex of 2011, but as I read her book in my darkened Austin home in February, they felt shockingly prescient. Her idea of rare earth mines in South Texas, too, is also partly coming true: One of the first rare earth processing facilities in the United States is opening in Hondo.
“I wanted to make up a speculative but entirely plausible near-future scenario that would allow me to take elements from struggles I had actually been involved in,” Cortez told the Observer, noting that she wrote most of the book during the Obama years, when federal legislation to push cities to decarbonize first seemed possible. The premise of the book is engaging, but it’s not a plot-heavy read: Cortez’s writing style is experimental and sometimes dense, more likely to include a mini-essay than a moment of high drama. She often riffs on intriguing concepts that would be better categorized as cultural studies than fiction, from recounting the Hispanicization of Ya Gna Wena, the traditional name given to the San Antonio River by the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe, to musing on the parallels between academic study and monastic life.
By exploring the poetics of land, labor, and social movements in more descriptive terms, Luz offers a wealth of insights on environmental justice in San Antonio. Rich, lyrical prose constantly refers back to power itself, calling our attention to the forces that shape us: “Something in me had broken open—like the hidden gas line beneath that old refinery, severed by a hapless construction crew, tripping an explosion that spelled out the end of an era. … For some reason I didn’t understand, it was Joel who had that power, who awakened a longing so wide and deep it crashed to my surface like oil or water, creating a river unaffordable, a shallow sea.”
In the thick of Lali’s fight against the utility rate hike, she’s compelled by a powerful desire toward independent journalist Joel Champlain, who uncovers city scandals around a controversial new mining practice called “gleaning.” Desire is a central theme; Luz invites us to treat it with critical attention. “Somewhere, someone had written that it is desire that powers the universe,” Cortez writes early on, calling the mother of all things “longing herself, the longing to be.” A respect for women’s stories about the liberating nature of desire, sexuality, and romantic love makes the book feel like a work of feminist theory at times, too. As the novel meanders along its path, we meet such fascinating characters as the radical nun Sister Soledad, who says erotic love shook her open to liberation theology and political struggle.
Joel and Lali and the rest of the “movement people”—the term favored by Cortez for the loose network of activists and volunteers they associate with—fight several battles at the city level. Cortez honors their often-unsuccessful struggles against problems understood to reflect centuries of history: One short essay places “contemporary power relations in San Antonio within a historical timeline that stretches back to the city’s roots in Spanish colonial rule,” and traces how predominantly wealthy, white residents have long controlled city politics. When an older Chicana activist from the fictional group VAMOS teaches Lali how to canvass, she ties utility rate hikes back to fights decades earlier against unequal, segregationist budget allocations for streets and drainage. “Why do you think we’re called VAMOS, anyway!” the elder says. “We’re viejas [old ladies] against more of the same!”
By leaning into her genre-bending writing style, Cortez creates something that feels like an epic poem at times and archival research or oral history at others. She draws from a local’s lifelong knowledge of San Antonio, from neighborhood lore, and from political history, such as in an essay on former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, the first Hispanic mayor of a major U.S. city, dubbed “King Henry from the Block.” At other times, though, the writing offers too few details. Especially at the beginning: Long sections on nature and abstract forces are hard to latch onto, and linger in a hazy, imprecise realm for too long. Still, this is a small price to pay for a wildly ambitious work. On the whole, the book, with its unexpected rhythms, is captivating.
Luz at Midnight revels in the particularities of San Antonio to uncover the very nature of extractive energy production, of capitalism and colonialism. The book argues that these things form the root of our problems, not the solution. Rather than continuing to invest in “a kind of development that impoverishes our communities,” and turning to technological solutions, Cortez shows that there has to be another way. Luz doesn’t exactly offer an optimistic view—as organizers know, you fail and you fail and you fail in the fight for environmental and economic justice—but it does help us remember everything that many neglected communities still have in abundance: ancestral knowledge, love, passion, resolve, and longing, all of which offer their own kind of power.
January 20, 2021
I recently finished reading this lovely book; I enjoyed it very much and hope to see more from this author. She writes beautifully; both in her prose and poetry. Because I live in San Antonio, I found the environmental issues and city politics very interesting, but I especially enjoyed the love story woven in and out through the book.
June 14, 2021
LUZ AT MIDNIGHT by Marisol Cortez
I won a Signed copy!!!! from Goodreads Giveaway, thank you also to Marisol Cortez and the publisher.
The author sure knows her stuff when it comes to.... environmental issues and local politics. The writing is engaging, beautiful prose.
There was some far-out parts that would kinda throw me off.
A good read.
I won a Signed copy!!!! from Goodreads Giveaway, thank you also to Marisol Cortez and the publisher.
The author sure knows her stuff when it comes to.... environmental issues and local politics. The writing is engaging, beautiful prose.
There was some far-out parts that would kinda throw me off.
A good read.
November 14, 2021
This is a book about longing: for social justice, for a soul mate, for environmental justice, for something as simple, yet unattainable, as time alone is for a mother, to think, to write.
"By thirty, though, her life had become irreversibly immanent-her concentration continually fraying against the everyday clutter of relationship..."
This book is a lament, a cry into the wilderness of disenfranchisement, marginalization, political corruption, racism, sexism, climate change, pollution, and on and on. It is a rant in poetic form, a love story: love of justice, romantic love, love of animals and children, and rivers and soil.
Told from the point of view of a strong female protagonist, a researcher, community advocate, and an environmental and social activist, this reader wonders, how much of this writing is fiction and how much is fact.
What I do not question is the worth of and the craft of the writing. The author is clearly and highly intelligent. She deftly weaves her plot with beautiful language and believable characters.
If you can deal with the raw truth of things as they are, the state of un-grace in which we find ourselves, if you can watch as one woman pushes through the mire, trying to make a difference, trying to find her own way, then this is the book for you.
"By thirty, though, her life had become irreversibly immanent-her concentration continually fraying against the everyday clutter of relationship..."
This book is a lament, a cry into the wilderness of disenfranchisement, marginalization, political corruption, racism, sexism, climate change, pollution, and on and on. It is a rant in poetic form, a love story: love of justice, romantic love, love of animals and children, and rivers and soil.
Told from the point of view of a strong female protagonist, a researcher, community advocate, and an environmental and social activist, this reader wonders, how much of this writing is fiction and how much is fact.
What I do not question is the worth of and the craft of the writing. The author is clearly and highly intelligent. She deftly weaves her plot with beautiful language and believable characters.
If you can deal with the raw truth of things as they are, the state of un-grace in which we find ourselves, if you can watch as one woman pushes through the mire, trying to make a difference, trying to find her own way, then this is the book for you.
January 20, 2021
Strong environmental theme - very thought provoking to see how local politics entwine into what may or may not be best for local communities. And there is a good human/love story entwined into the book also.
Will need to watch to see what this author writes next.
Will need to watch to see what this author writes next.
February 24, 2021
For me as a reader, Luz at Midnight ranks among the best of environmentally-themed novels by writers like Edward Abbey, Richard Powers, and Kathleen Dean Moore. Cortez is a master of lyrical prose with an ability to shift effortlessly from rendering the humorous and absurd to astute political and ecological analysis to all the emotional layers of being human. The plot of this page-turning, genre-bending South Texas story is nothing short of brilliant, and turns out to have been weirdly prescient for those of us who just lived through the Texas polar vortex. Luz at Midnight is both a shattering love story and a grito for social justice.
March 6, 2022
FlowerSong Press is excited about the release of the Texas Institute of Letters’ announcement of winners for the 2021 Literary Awards. We are ecstatic to see Marisol Cortez win the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction for her new release Luz at Midnight.
Luz at Midnight tells a story of universal love and an ill-timed love affair while surrounded by the climate change politics and environmental injustice uniquely unfolding in South Texas. FlowerSong Press’ Editor-In-Chief/Publisher, Edward Vidaurre, states “We celebrate with Marisol as her important novel educates and leads the way for more work of ecological, lyric, and political importance.”
Luz at Midnight tells a story of universal love and an ill-timed love affair while surrounded by the climate change politics and environmental injustice uniquely unfolding in South Texas. FlowerSong Press’ Editor-In-Chief/Publisher, Edward Vidaurre, states “We celebrate with Marisol as her important novel educates and leads the way for more work of ecological, lyric, and political importance.”
December 24, 2021
What a novel has to do to win my love: Make me think. Make me feel. Teach me something new. Expand my understanding--of people, of the world, of history, of something, something that matters. It has to have something at stake, or rather it has to have a stake in something, something bigger than the puny personal travails of one character or another, which is not to say that characters don't matter, because they do, and of course characterization can make or break a novel. But aside from a writer's artistry with character portrayal, IMO there is no more urgent or meaningful subject of art than human suffering--but it can't be mere individual human suffering. For a piece of art to be important, to make a contribution, in my view, it has to show how individual lives, individuals' pain, are situated in a broader context and are linked up to the great masses of suffering humanity; there has to be a wider lens, it has to show the whys and wherefores, connect the dots. Remember, that great and much-cited command from E.M. Forster in Howard's End--"Only connect!"--is almost always misinterpreted. It does not refer to interpersonal relations, it is not telling us to find a connection with another human being, which is what we're constantly told. When you come to that sentence in the book, you read it as an admonishment to face the fact that the way you live your life is directly connected to the way others are forced to live theirs--that your big beautiful house and gorgeous lush green yard in, oh say northeast San Antonio, for example, is connected to the destruction of the city's ecosystem, and to the deepening impoverishment and displacement of whole swathes of its inhabitants who live way across town southwest of you, that your wealth is stolen from them. All this is to say that what else I need to love a novel is for it to "only connect" and by doing so to transcend the pettier and, to me, less interesting concerns of most fiction. Long way of saying ooh I love me some explicitly political fiction. Finally, of course, the writing has to sing. It has to carry me along and carry me away.
So. Yeah. As you might by now have figured out, I love Luz at Midnight. This is one wonderful novel. It does everything I want fiction to do, and then some. The cherry on top is the writing, which is not just good but beautiful, not just beautiful but in places flat-out dazzling. The risk with dazzling writing, with grand sweeps of prose that twist and turn and fly higher and higher, is that it can lose its way, either fizzle out or go too far, become overwrought, pile on one metaphor too many, strain and burst. OK, no novel is perfect, so to grant the obligatory quibble, that does happen here on occasion; now and then I wished for a bit more writerly restraint. But only a handful of times. Much more often I was carried along by the writer's remarkably sure hand and deft control of imagery. Many times a passage took my breath away.
What will she do with novel #2? I can't wait to see.
So. Yeah. As you might by now have figured out, I love Luz at Midnight. This is one wonderful novel. It does everything I want fiction to do, and then some. The cherry on top is the writing, which is not just good but beautiful, not just beautiful but in places flat-out dazzling. The risk with dazzling writing, with grand sweeps of prose that twist and turn and fly higher and higher, is that it can lose its way, either fizzle out or go too far, become overwrought, pile on one metaphor too many, strain and burst. OK, no novel is perfect, so to grant the obligatory quibble, that does happen here on occasion; now and then I wished for a bit more writerly restraint. But only a handful of times. Much more often I was carried along by the writer's remarkably sure hand and deft control of imagery. Many times a passage took my breath away.
What will she do with novel #2? I can't wait to see.
November 24, 2021
Thoughts and Themes: When I started reading this book I was thrilled to find that it was hoping through different genres and that it was touching on climate change, but unfortunately the thrill wore off rather quickly. Halfway through the book, the switching of genres was just confusing me and I wasn't able to follow the storyline anymore. I thought this was going to be a love story and not just between a man and a woman but also between humans and the earth.
I did get to a point in the book in which I was just skimming my way through it as it couldn't hold my attention any longer. I thought that the build up of the story took way too much time in the book and I was a bit over halway and the love interest still wasn't in the picture. It felt a lot like world building which was strange because it was taking place in our world but at the same time it felt like it wasn't our world.
Characters: One of the things that I really did like about this book was all of the characters that you are introduced to throughout the book. I really did enjoy getting to meet each character at the start of the book as the story is being introduced to us. I liked how they all have their unique traits, connections with each other and the many things that they added to the story.
Writing Style: This book switched between genres a lot and that really was confusing to me. I do believe that people who are a fan of multiple genres in a book, environmental books, magical realism, etc would really enjoy this book. Something else that kept throwing me off was the research notes that were included in the story, I found that those took a way from the story as I couldn't really build the connection. At first I thought they were outside notes being brought into the story until I realized that these were notes the main character was taking.
I did get to a point in the book in which I was just skimming my way through it as it couldn't hold my attention any longer. I thought that the build up of the story took way too much time in the book and I was a bit over halway and the love interest still wasn't in the picture. It felt a lot like world building which was strange because it was taking place in our world but at the same time it felt like it wasn't our world.
Characters: One of the things that I really did like about this book was all of the characters that you are introduced to throughout the book. I really did enjoy getting to meet each character at the start of the book as the story is being introduced to us. I liked how they all have their unique traits, connections with each other and the many things that they added to the story.
Writing Style: This book switched between genres a lot and that really was confusing to me. I do believe that people who are a fan of multiple genres in a book, environmental books, magical realism, etc would really enjoy this book. Something else that kept throwing me off was the research notes that were included in the story, I found that those took a way from the story as I couldn't really build the connection. At first I thought they were outside notes being brought into the story until I realized that these were notes the main character was taking.
August 4, 2022
What a beautiful book! I was sad when I finished it—I didn’t want it to be over. It’s that kind of book.
One of the (many) things I appreciated about it is the way the author describes mental illness, though that term nor any specific diagnoses are ever mentioned. To me, it seems that’s how our internal struggles are: Though they may be labeled and categorized externally, inside they are amorphous, confusing. And what I really loved is how this book makes you question the line between mental illness and an understandable reaction to a destructive society.
One of the (many) things I appreciated about it is the way the author describes mental illness, though that term nor any specific diagnoses are ever mentioned. To me, it seems that’s how our internal struggles are: Though they may be labeled and categorized externally, inside they are amorphous, confusing. And what I really loved is how this book makes you question the line between mental illness and an understandable reaction to a destructive society.
March 26, 2022
Whew -as we used to say when I was a civil service employee, this one is way above my pay scale. . I cannot say I really began - but for a few pages, I tried to read it. It may have been about a woman finding a new partner in life or about the environment. What ever it was - it was not for me.
January 7, 2022
This was a lyrical, extremely well written and thought provoking book about political, social, and environmental activism in San Antonio. There is a romance story and a dash of magical realism thrown in.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews