Alex Nava (2013) Wonder and Exile in the New World, The Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, Pennsylvania, PA), xii + 260 pp. $69.95 hbk. Wonder and Exile attempts to use history as a creative endeavour that inspires readers in the present. To accomplish this task, the author created an extended essay reviewing Iberian and New World authors in the early modern era and the twentieth century that experience the world with exhilarated wonder and the reflective meditation of exile. Swinging wildly at times from Billie Holiday to Christopher Columbus, Nava's book is itself a work with Baroque sensibilities. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the ideas of wonder and exile in the context of the European arrival in the New World. They are, he argues, key to the narrative of dispossession found in the history and literature of the Americas: wonder a dispossession of knowledge and exile a dispossession of place. Free of these anchors, authors and travellers often revel and occasionally despair at the world around them. While historians may work diligently to recreate a view of the past from documents, Nava urges readers to revel in the awe of their position as strangers in a strange land. Focusing on the theoretical framework of Michel de Certeau in Chapter 1, Nava then applies those ideas to Christopher Columbus and Bartolome de Las Casas in Chapter 2. The author strips away the narratives of Columbus as hero or villain and instead presents the reader with Columbus as a man in exuberant revelry with the New World. Las Casas is not only the defender of indigenous rights, but a man in exile raging at Europe while simultaneously in wonder of the indigenous. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the importance of Baroque arts and religion to the Americas, with a particular emphasis on Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes and New Spain scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The Americas are exemplarily Baroque, the author tells us, because it is the place where creation and death come crashing together, and the excess and vulgarity of a full life meet a desperate struggle to find God. Nava applies these ideas to Cervantes, whose Don Quixote marks a man that is both in wonder as he moves about Spain, but also a man in exile, dislocated from his present with his focus on the past. Sor Juana is also a woman that experiences the pain of exile as a brilliant and passionate woman in a world where all of her various loves – both academic and personal – are taboo. In Chapter 5 Nava leaps ahead three centuries to the authors of magical realism. With a sharp focus on Gabriel García Márquez, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier, the authors of magical realism push the limits of imagination and extravagance, leaping into worlds where no boundaries or rules exist. They represent, argues Nava, a desire for a mystical experience of beauty to counter the agony of the present while still bearing witness to the injustices of the same. Nava's book is an interesting if curious experiment. The author is clearly enamoured of his subject and works hard to communicate that excitement; readers unfamiliar with the host of theoreticians and authors flying at them with no introduction will feel as if they have entered blindly into a snowstorm of names. Similarly, while wonder and awe unite the work and the scholarship is wide-ranging and impressive, the leap from Sor Juana to Magical Realism seemed inexplicable. Were there no travellers or authors that experienced exile and wonder in Latin America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Certainly Fernandez de Lizardi's satirical, vulgar romp through late New Spain's society, Allesandro Malaspina's explorations, or the romantic interpretations of Alexander von Humboldt's travels might qualify. And what of Brazil? Once more, Brazil itself is exiled from yet another work on the new world when that vast expanse of South America served as a place of wonder and exile for so many. In a related note, the selection and organisation (or lack of) feel almost as if a student has gathered their reading list from courses on Spanish and Spanish American literature into three sections (early colonial, late colonial, and twentieth century) and assembled them as a book. Indeed, all of the sources are English language translations, moving this reviewer to ponder what more we would have learned about the ideas of wonder and exile had the author considered the works cited in the original Spanish. The work is thoughtful and intriguing, and no doubt will inspire a small circle of literature scholars and graduate students to consider the ideas of the Baroque, fascination, wonder, and awe in their own work. This is not a book intended for the casual public and certainly not for undergraduate courses.