Description
Fiction. Jillian Guzmán, who is nine years old at the beginning of the book, communicates through drawings rather than speech as she travels with her mother, Angie O'Malley, throughout the borderlands of Arizona and northwestern Mexico. Later she creates survival maps for border crossers and paints murals at the Casa de los Olvidados, a refuge in Sonora run by the traditional healer Juana of God. These darkly funny tales, focusing on Mexican-American, Euro-American, and Mexican characters, feature visionary experiences, ghosts, faith healers, a deer's head that speaks, a dog who channels spirits of the dead—and a young woman whose drawings begin to create realities instead of just reflecting them.
Author Bio
Beth Alvarado, who has written extensively about her experiences as a Euro-American woman marrying into a Mexican-American family, has spent most of her life in Arizona. Her most recent book, Anxious Attachments, was a finalist for the 2020 Oregon Book Awards and was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein- Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award. She's also the author of Anthropologies: A Family Memoir and the short story collection Not a Matter of Love. She now lives in Bend, Oregon, where she is core faculty at OSU- Cascades Low Residency MFA Program.
Author City: BEND, OR USA