The Days of Anna Madrigal

November 11, 2013
This ninth Tales of the City installment is Maupin’s farewell to his beloved cast of characters. While his last few books have highlighted San Francisco’s Michael “Mouse” Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, the author updates fans with 28 Barbary Lane’s now-92-year-old transgendered landlady, Anna Madrigal. Anna is given the snappy, plucky dialogue she’s known for, and some chapters reveal her backstory, including her 1930s childhood, when she was a boy named Andy. Everyone is on hand here: Brian, Mary Ann’s ex and father of her daughter Shawna, makes an appearance, accompanied by his “fiftyish and luscious” new wife Wren, a former plus-sized model, along with Mouse and Mary Ann. Maupin’s flare for dialogue and fully-realized, contemporary characterization is again on display, as he keeps things hip with the use of modern vernacular (“amazeballs”, “chillax”) and by incorporating iPads (Jake’s “magic slate”), Angry Birds, missives on Twitter, and hooking up on Facebook. The story culminates in the group’s attendance at the Burning Man “Fertility 2.0” festival, as Shawna searches for a sperm donor while Brian, Wren, and Anna detour off to Winnemucca for a revelatory reunion with Anna’s past. Limned with the comfort of unconditional love yet reflective of the frailty, the uncertainty, and the beauty of aging, this installment is a memorable, satisfying capstone to his series.

November 1, 2013

Time marches on for all of us, including the beloved characters of Maupin's "Tales of the City" series (Mary Ann in Autumn; Babycakes). In what Maupin says is the last of the series, Anna Madrigal is 92 and frail; Michael is sixtysomething and feeling much older than his husband, Ben; and the youngest characters are starting to settle down. Once again, the characters revolve around Anna, but so does the plot; we see her backstory as a 16-year-old boy, growing up in a Depression-era brothel as she just begins to understand her nature. Interestingly, most of the action occurs far away from the eponymous city. Instead, the gang goes desert road-tripping: Anna on a last pilgrimage to the past, while the others go to the Burning Man festival, where the spirit of old San Francisco still lives on in collective art, community service, and freewheeling sexuality. VERDICT For fans definitely, but anyone may enjoy the peek into Burning Man culture, as well as the intergenerational twining of the characters and seeing just how far we have come in accepting ourselves. [See Prepub Alert, 8/12/13.]--Devon Thomas, Chelsea, MI

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2013

In this wrap-up to Maupin's beloved "Tales of the City" series, Anna Madrigal, the famed transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane, revisits the Nevada whorehouse she fled as a 16-year-old boy. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2013
More "Tales of the City" (Mary Ann in Autumn, 2010, etc.), with the former residents of 28 Barbary Ln. still fluttering around their erstwhile landlady. Anna Madrigal is now 93 and very frail, but she's still got the gender-crossing panache that led her away from the whorehouse her mother ran in Winnemucca, Nev., and from the unwanted appendages associated with her youth as a boy named Andy. Having had one of the earliest sex-change operations in the U.S., Anna is a legend in the transgender community, and her young caretaker, Jake, has built a special float for her to ride at this year's Burning Man festival to receive what everyone knows will probably be her final accolades. He is ultimately persuaded by others in their San Francisco circle that it's too risky, and indeed, the closing chapters' vivid depiction of the "mosh pit in the desert," as Michael Tolliver calls Burning Man, makes it seem an unlikely place for an elderly lady. But while Michael, husband Ben, bisexual celebrity Shawna (who's looking for a sperm donor) and many others are cavorting in the Nevada desert, Anna has unfinished business in not-too-far-away Winnemucca, to which she has persuaded Shawna's father (and Michael's close friend), Brian, and his new wife, Wren, to drive her in their air-conditioned RV. So it's no surprise when Anna finally ends up at Burning Man after the not-terribly-dramatic resolution to a conflict laid out in flashbacks to the year she left home at 16. Readers not up to speed on the series may have trouble sorting out all the relationships (and genders), but Maupin spins his usual good-hearted web of intrigues involving people who have created their own community to shelter them from disapproving straights. The plot is as soap-operatic as usual, though thankfully, Maupin has abandoned the lurid improbabilities that marred Mary Ann in Autumn in favor of touching reunions and reconciliations. Sweet, undemanding entertainment most suitable for longtime fans.

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Starred review from November 15, 2013
Alas, this is the ninth and final novel in Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series, the first three volumes of which were made into a television miniseries starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis, which has now achieved cult status. But let's not mourn the end of this run of rich, loving novels. Instead, let's read this tender last one as a celebration of the wonderful characters Maupin created, whose lives have centered on landlady and den-mother Anna Madrigal's home at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco. Anna is now 92 years old, as infirm as her age would dictate, but the feisty, generous, selfless spirit that has guided her and attracted so many people to her side remains unbroken. While a group of her friends heads off to Burning Man, the wild arts festival held yearly in the Nevada desert, other friends of Anna's take her back to her hometown, also in Nevada, which she has not visited since she left there as a boy in the 1930s, and where she now hopes to reconcile a situation that has been on her mind since then. Admirably, Maupin's last novel in the series is as compulsively readable and endearing as all previous novels have been. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An eight-city author tour will be accompanied by national-media and online-publicity campaigns.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)