SOURCE: A review of Alburquerque, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall, 1992, pp. 201–02.

In the following review, Jones offers a favorable assessment of Alburquerque.

At the age of twenty-one, Abrán González—the former Golden Gloves boxer and pride of the Albuquerque barrio—discovers at the deathbed of his birth mother Cynthia Johnson that he was adopted and is half Anglo. This revelation begins Abrán's quest for his father, which forms the center of a magical book that heals like the hands of a curandera shaman.

Alburquerque fairly brims with considerations of origins. The title reclaims the city's original spelling, lost when an Anglo stationmaster dropped the first r on the railroad sign. Abrán's search for his own beginnings thrusts him into Cynthia's high-society world. He meets Frank Dominic, one of Albuquerque's richest powerbrokers, Ben Chávez, a Latino novelist, and Marisa Martínez...