There are novels that narrate a life, and there are novels that observe it—quietly, incisively, almost from the margins of their own unfolding. Count Me Out: The Education of Paul Francisco belongs to the latter tradition. In this richly layered work, Anthony Barcellos gives us not simply a coming-of-age story, but a meditation on consciousness itself: how a boy becomes aware not only of the world, but of his position within it—linguistically, culturally, and morally—in California’s Central Valley. From its opening gestures, echoing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel announces its lineage, yet it remains firmly rooted in a distinctly Portuguese-American soil.

At its center is Paul Francisco, a child prodigy of perception rather than of action, a boy who watches, interprets, and quietly resists. His “education” is not merely academic; it is existential. He learns language, yes—but also learns the fractures between languages. He learns family—but also the limits of familial belonging. He learns America—but never quite abandons the Azorean inheritance that structures his earliest consciousness.

Paul Francisco is, above all, an observer. From his earliest childhood moments—staring at a shoelace and suddenly grasping that he alone is seeing it, that his awareness is singular—he becomes conscious of himself as a “locus of awareness,” a phrase that captures the philosophical depth of Barcellos’s project. This moment is not incidental; it is foundational. It establishes Paul not as a traditional protagonist driven by action, but as a thinker, a watcher, a boy who lives in the space between experience and interpretation.

This places him in a lineage of American literary figures who stand slightly apart from their worlds: Stephen Dedalus, certainly, but also Nick Carraway, and even the introspective narrators of Philip Roth. Yet Paul is distinct in that his distance is not only psychological—it is cultural. He observes not because he is detached by temperament alone, but because he inhabits multiple worlds at once.

One of the most powerful dimensions of the novel is its treatment of language. Portuguese is the language of home, intimacy, and inheritance. English is the language of school, authority, and assimilation. The tension between the two is not abstract; it is lived daily.

Paul’s confusion in kindergarten—where his cousin answers “Aqui!” instead of “Here”—is not merely a charming anecdote. It is a moment of linguistic displacement, one that marks the beginning of a lifelong negotiation between identities. English becomes necessary, even dominant, but Portuguese lingers as a kind of emotional grammar, shaping how Paul understands family, religion, and self.

This duality recalls works such as The House on Mango Street and The Joy Luck Club, where language is similarly tied to identity, marginality, and generational distance. Yet Barcellos’s contribution is unique in its Azorean specificity—a community often overlooked in broader narratives of American ethnicity.

Barcellos’s Central Valley is not merely a setting; it is a social ecosystem. Portuguese-American dairymen exist alongside Mexican-American laborers, Dust Bowl migrants, and Anglo authority figures. The novel captures this stratified world with precision: the “Willow kids,” marked by poverty and marginalization; the seasonal movements of Mexican families; the insular yet cohesive Portuguese community.

In this sense, the novel stands in conversation with East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath. Like John Steinbeck, Barcellos understands the Central Valley as a place where identity is forged through labor, land, and migration. But where Steinbeck often centers the Anglo or pan-American experience, Barcellos narrows the lens, giving voice to a specific ethnic community within that broader landscape.

The dairies, the rural schools, the Catholic institutions—all become sites where ethnicity is both preserved and contested. The Portuguese language, the use of terms like “Vovó” and “Avô,” the rituals of Catholicism—these are not nostalgic details. They are the infrastructure of identity.

What makes Count Me Out particularly compelling is its tonal complexity. The novel is often very funny—wryly, subtly so. Paul’s literal-mindedness leads to moments of quiet comedy, as when he answers his grandmother’s impossible question about which “avó” he prefers, with devastating honesty. The humor here is not simply for relief; it reveals the child’s moral logic, his inability to navigate the unspoken rules of adult diplomacy.

Similarly, the scenes with the speech therapist—where Paul bristles at being mistaken for Spanish rather than Portuguese—carry both humor and a deeper cultural wound. The laughter is tinged with irritation, even resistance.

But beneath this humor lies a persistent melancholy. Paul’s isolation—intellectual, cultural, emotional—is never far from the surface. His precocity distances him from his peers; his bilingual world distances him from American norms; his observational nature distances him from spontaneous participation in life.

This interplay recalls The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Call It Sleep, where humor coexists with historical and personal burden, and where the immigrant child’s consciousness becomes both a gift and a weight.

One of Barcellos’s greatest achievements lies in his dialogue. It is precise, economical, and deeply revealing. Characters speak in ways that encode their identities: Portuguese phrases slip naturally into conversation; English carries the weight of authority or schooling; generational differences emerge in tone and vocabulary.

The dialogue is never ornamental—it is structural. Through it, Barcellos captures the rhythms of a bilingual household, the awkward negotiations of cultural translation, and the subtle hierarchies of family and community.

In this, he joins a tradition of American writers who use dialogue as a primary tool of characterization—writers like Ernest Hemingway and Don DeLillo. Yet Barcellos’s dialogue carries an additional burden: it must convey not just character, but cultural hybridity.

And perhaps it is precisely here—within this trembling space between tongues, between what is said and what resists being said—that another presence quietly reveals itself. Not as voice, but as listening. Not as authorship, but as care. For every text that moves between worlds carries, invisibly, the trace of those who have guided it across.

To this already nuanced meditation on language, identity, and consciousness, one must add a dimension too often left in the margins of literary discourse: the quiet, exacting labor of editorial craft. In this volume, Katharine F. Baker emerges as a presence both discreet and indispensable. Her role as editor is not merely technical, but interpretive—an act of attentive listening to the cadence of the text, to its silences, to the fragile equilibrium between memory and narration. Across the work, one senses a refining intelligence at play, shaping clarity without erasing texture, guiding the prose toward accessibility while preserving its Azorean soul. Editing, here, becomes an ethical engagement with the text, a commitment to fidelity not only to meaning, but to atmosphere, rhythm, and cultural weight. And yet, this contribution unfolds within a longer tide of dedication: for over twenty-five years, Baker has also labored as a translator of Azorean literature, carrying its voices across linguistic and geographic thresholds. Through that sustained work, she has helped shape a transatlantic literary space where these narratives are not merely read, but recognized—where the echoes of the islands travel outward without ever dissolving their origin.

The title Count Me Out resonates on multiple levels. It suggests exclusion, refusal, and perhaps even self-exile. Paul’s education—academic, linguistic, cultural—does not seamlessly integrate him into American society. Instead, it often sets him apart.

His intelligence becomes a form of isolation. His ability to “figure things out” alienates him from peers who do not share his pace or interests. His teachers recognize his gifts but cannot fully accommodate them. His family values education but remains rooted in a different cultural logic.

This dynamic echoes Invisible Man, where education promises inclusion but delivers a more complex, often disorienting reality. Paul is not invisible in the same way, but he is similarly caught between recognition and misunderstanding.

In the end, Count Me Out: The Education of Paul Francisco unfolds less as a narrative that concludes than as a tide that recedes without ever fully leaving the shore. It gathers its meaning not in resolution, but in return—in the slow, rhythmic accumulation of gestures, words, and silences that shape a consciousness always slightly apart, always listening. Anthony Barcellos has given us a work that inhabits the interstices: between languages, between inheritances, between the land one stands on and the one that persists, half-visible, in memory. It is a Central Valley novel, yes, but also an insular one in the deepest sense—an island carried within the self, circled by distances that are as much linguistic as they are emotional. And so the act of noticing, which defines Paul Francisco from the beginning, becomes not simply perception, but destiny: a way of inhabiting the world without ever fully dissolving into it. Like the sea that both separates and binds the Azores to their diasporas, the novel leaves us suspended in that space of continual crossing—where to see clearly is also to remain apart, and where belonging is never a fixed place, but a movement, a return, a horizon that withdraws even as we approach it.

Diniz Borges, California State University-Fresno.

We thank MoonWater Editions and the poet/novelist/essayist and editor, Avelina da Silveira, for her work on this edition. This book is a joint venture of Bruma Publications and MoonWater Editions.

We at Bruma Publications thank Tom Barcellos and the entire family for allowing us to work on Anthony’s book and to publish it here in the US and through MoonWater Editions in the Azores.