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Book Review: ‘We Are Rich’ Is Worth the Read
Who is a true Santa Barbaran? Who belongs here, in this little bit of Mediterranean paradise shoe-horned between the mountains and the sea? Is it the Old Money? The farmers who love the land? The New Money lured here by our own tourist brochures? Or is it a combination of all of these types of people and more?
Dori Carter’s thinly veiled Rancho Esperanza is inhabited by all the characters that inhabit the real Santa Barbara. Told in a series of 12 vignettes, Carter’s We Are Rich seeks to capture the essence of the people who live in and love Santa Barbara.
The characters are slightly more veiled than the locations used, and readers will have fun guessing which character may have been based on which real-life Santa Barbaran. Each vignette is both biography and satire, a serious memoir and caustic stereotype.
From the unabashed snobbery of Old Money to the far more subtle arrogance of Old Family With No Money, Carter exposes the attitudes and mores of those with the longest-running claims to belonging in Santa Barbara. She also has a great time pillorying the newcomers, whether they are new money or star-struck tourists.
If We Are Rich had stopped at satire, it would have been quite a fun beach read. Quickly read, and quickly forgotten. But these people are intertwined in a shocking way, and as the story inches up on the big revelation, the reader knows that something is up, but not quite what. As it stands, the big secret everyone is hiding is what keeps We Are Rich from being as shallow and vapid as some of its characters.
» We Are Rich
» By Dori Carter
» Hardcover, 208 pages
» Other Press LLC
» April 2009
» ISBN-13: 9781590513071
— Carol Ann Chybowski, who received a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from UCSB, is an aspiring author with short stories in the local anthologies A Community of Voices. The former Santa Barbara resident resides in Southern California.
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» on 06.16.09 @ 08:35 AM
It’s hard for anything to be much more shallow and vapid than this review, which indulges in at least as much elitest tripe as its subject.
» on 06.16.09 @ 08:53 AM
The headline of this review is not supported by the analysis of the book. “Shallow and vapid” hardly means “worth the read”. Lousy review of a lousy book; part of the task of literary review is to find work that at least aspires to quality and original thought and intelligent expression of characters and themes. You need to find some new voices out there.
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