Mario Alberto Zambrano has had a soaring career as a contemporary ballet dancer, refining moves with some of the most innovative dance troupes in Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. Now Zambrano choreographs words.

His debut novel, “Loteria,” is out. It’s a polished tome of prose unreeling the tale of plucky little Luz Maria Castillo in the game of chance called life.

Memories stir and storm for the 11-year-old narrator, Luz, as she flips over cards from the Mexican bingo-like game called loteria. Each image in the loteria deck unlocks a chapter in Luz’s life. La arana, a spider in cobwebs, opens the book. Luz sits in a state institution while her older sister Estrella lies in a hospital ICU and her father sulks behind bars. State officials want Luz to talk about her feelings. She will only do so on the pages of her journal.

We peer like voyeurs artfully led by Zambrano’s pacing, dialogue and comically drawn characters. “What I write is for You and me and no one else,” says Luz as she charms the reader to be God’s understudy.

Luz starts life with a love for song and dance. At wedding receptions, others would stand back in a circle and cheer her on. She loves Texas’ Selena, flamenco icon Lola Flores and wears tennis shoes that spell out S-A-M-B-A.

Luz is mostly clear-eyed about the adult world around her. At times, she and her mother are “like bad actresses in a telenovela.” Such is family drama. Her father is hard-drinking and abusive, yet she is willing to forgive him even when he breaks her hand for an act in which her older cousin Memo played villain. She wants to make Papi happy, sing him Mexican rancheras, share a brandy. They already share the same dark skin.

But what we witness are the madonna-whore roles into which men categorize females, even a little child like Luz.

Her mother is beautiful, light-skinned, green-eyed and abused in pained scenes that would end in mornings with Band-Aids at each eye.

When her mother starts working as a housekeeper for Dr. Roberto, Luz grows suspicious of the fancy shoes her mother wears to the job. How will she persevere when her mother leaves and her sister gets hurt?

Reader-voyeurs can only watch and wait for the lyrical word pictures as Luz slips back in time, in memory, to innocence, her own way of escape to the sound of la rana, the green frog plastered on yet another loteria card.

“Loteria” should delight and disturb any reader sensitive to the ways of children and how they think and, more importantly, how deeply they feel.

By Dianne Solis

(The Dallas Morning News)

(MCT Information Services)