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Oh Mexico!
On sale
16th June 2011
Price: £9.99
Set against the vibrant background of one of the world’s most dangerous cities, Oh Mexico! is not only a classic travel memoir, but also contains great narrative and stuffed with amazing facts about this country’s colourful history, lit up by warmth, wit, wisdom and pizzazz. With an eye for the bizarre and comic, Lucy’s engaging account of surviving life and love in a vast, bustling Central American city is irresistible. After graduating from university with an Arts degree, she is faced with a dilemma: find a job or disappear to Latin America, the exotic land of her childhood dreams!
Arriving in Mexico City with little money and only basic Spanish, Lucy’s To-Do list is simple enough: Next morning I awoke and began writing a to do list. Not that I am an organised person, but I was feeling overwhelmed and I always find that a to do list gives me a sense that there is a potential to cope with the situation. 1. Find something to eat, 2. Wash undies, 3. Learn Spanish and 4. Get a job
Lucy promptly finds work as an English teacher and scores a room in a sunny apartment. Her new flatmate, the well-connected Octavio, is unnervingly attractive. So begins an adventure of comic challenges as Lucy negotiates Mexico City’s stratified worlds, meeting everyone from street hawkers to crazy gringos, academics and socialites. Then, as the two men she accidentally falls in love with discover each other s existence, her extrovert family arrive for a visit!
With a curious mind and a knowing eye, Lucy’s account of life in this riotous third-world metropolis that is Mexico City is utterly irresistible.
Arriving in Mexico City with little money and only basic Spanish, Lucy’s To-Do list is simple enough: Next morning I awoke and began writing a to do list. Not that I am an organised person, but I was feeling overwhelmed and I always find that a to do list gives me a sense that there is a potential to cope with the situation. 1. Find something to eat, 2. Wash undies, 3. Learn Spanish and 4. Get a job
Lucy promptly finds work as an English teacher and scores a room in a sunny apartment. Her new flatmate, the well-connected Octavio, is unnervingly attractive. So begins an adventure of comic challenges as Lucy negotiates Mexico City’s stratified worlds, meeting everyone from street hawkers to crazy gringos, academics and socialites. Then, as the two men she accidentally falls in love with discover each other s existence, her extrovert family arrive for a visit!
With a curious mind and a knowing eye, Lucy’s account of life in this riotous third-world metropolis that is Mexico City is utterly irresistible.
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Reviews
Every so often a young writer comes along who can open up a special place to us, and at the same time remind us all of the way we were. This is what Lucy Neville has done in this enchanting travel memoir.
Delightful first book, the "chick-lit Bill Bryson"...Oh Mexico! fearlessly mixes it down on the streets of Mexico City, its sensibility is the antidote to every macho, exhaust-fogged travelogue that you have ever avoided reading. Somebody needs to cough up tributes to her skill at untangling Mexico's politics, her cool take on its religious cults and her gift for getting into scrapes, the most bizarre of which was being cast in Mexico's top soap opera. But she is best of all on the Mexican mentality.
Lucy takes you along as she deals with public transport, shopping, the endless doubles entendres of the local language (almost everything has a secondary, sexual connotation) male machismo, local politics, a hilariously fraught visit by her parents and sister and much more. Anybody who has ever been a 20-something traveller should enjoy this engaging read think Holy Cow in Mexico.
Part love story, part adventure, Oh Mexico! is a fun, light read, ideal for those eager to run away.
Mexico City is famous for decapitations and gang violence. So announcing you are moving there would worry most parents - even Lucy s ``unshockable father Richard Neville, once tried for obscenity in the infamous Oz Boys case. Lucy s comic observation and eye for the bizarre results in a classic coming of age romantic travel memoir that mixes Almost French with Like Water for Chocolate.
A vibrant account of life in Mexico. It is a typical tale of an adventurous twentysomething...excellent when describing the challenge of finding a place to live, being overwhelmed by the sex appeal of her handsome flatmate, responding spontaneously to new and alien experiences, finding a job teaching English to a group of women she calls the "First Wives' Breakfast Club", struggling with the complexities of speaking a foreign language, unraveling the nuances of class in Mexican society and learning the subtleties and texture of daily life in Mexico City. The combination of adventure and romance is charming and informative. Her parents' arrival just as she is disentangling herself from love affairs with two men adds a frisson of clandestine chaos. Neville is a talented writer whose easy, warm style and very "non-chick lit" calmness in the presence of glamorous men makes for an entertaining account of two years and two loves in a city little known to many.
At its very best, travel writing has the capacity to illuminate not only the heart of a traveller but of a country, too. The page-turning journey that is Oh Mexico! manages to do both things with considerable skill and frequent hilarity...Neville has the canny reserve of a born story teller ,capturing the dissonances as well as the melodies of expatriate life in a country like no other.
Neville's first book is a travel memoir written with all the panache the pizazz, the characters and suspense of a good novel.