Bücher von Robert Franklin Gish

In this first in The Salinas Trilogy, Nina Lucero discovers that blood guilt has its consequences as she fights her way to self reliance, escaping from the multicultural, Pentecostal confines of a rural upbringing in southern New Mexico. Whether in butchering prize farm animals for food, hunting deer in the nearby Manzano Mountains with her war-vet uncle, warding off the lecherous attacks of neighboring twin brothers, or protecting herself from combative school-girl rivals, violence and blood map the way of Nina's individuation. Marriage to a delusional pastor caught up in snake worship offers her only tragic respite from the perverse darkness engulfing her spirit and the historic Native American and Hispanic ruins just beyond her father's sheep ranch. She has the stuff to save herself and her children, but will she? Are divorce and a move to Albuquerque the answers? Will the soothing strains of her brother's enchanting guitar and her mother's fateful courage help? Atonement must come for Nina and her family but so must even more catastrophic blood guilt. Includes Readers Guide.

Growing up in a Spanish American culture in the American West at the turn of the twentieth century invites assimilation, a process made all the more conflicted through the evolving stages of individuation and the tensions of political correctness and hyphenated identities: Anglo-American, Spanish-American, Mexican-American, Native American, and the subcultures of Stompers, Pachucos, Chicanos, Cholos, Indios, and Squares. This book contains a dozen interconnected stories set against these laminated ethnicities. Whether read as love songs or laments these soul stories all serenade the American Southwest and its allure as a landscape of adventure and romance during the transition from Old to New West. It is said that a land determines a people and is determined by them, a belief told lyrically and poignantly in these story serenades. Includes Readers Guide.