St. Agnes' Stand

Finished December 25

St. Agnes' Stand by Thomas Eidson

This historical western was a real page-turner for me. I wanted to find out what happened to the party of nuns and orphans that was under siege by the natives. 

I did have issues with how the Apaches were portrayed, and the violence they enacted on the people they captured. Even in the scenes between the indigenous people, they lacked depth and were stereotypical. 

The main character, Ned Swanson, is on the run from two men who want to exact revenge for him killing a friend of theirs. He wants to get to California where he has a deed to land and intends to make a fresh start. He's been on his own since he was a child and his family was killed by a passing group of Comanches. He's learned to look after himself and not depend on anyone else. 

When he comes across a group of Apaches standing near a couple of overturned wagons in a rocky gully, he makes a small act and kills one of them from afar. When he observes the wagons through his telescope, he sees a woman's face, an older woman. He determines that he can do nothing for them, and has to get moving. 

The leader of the small group under siege, Sister St. Agnes travelled with the other nuns from Philadelphia to ransom back children that were ransomed from natives by the Mexicans, who, in turn, wanted money for them. She was somewhat successful, and is now returning home with the children and her fellow nuns, with the wagons driven by Mexicans. Now, the sieged group consists of three nuns and seven children. Sister St. Agnes has been praying for God to send someone. 

When Nat goes against his better judgement and makes his way to the wagons, he wasn't expecting such a large group, nor a group so ill-equipped to outrun their captors. 

The story is a suspenseful one, with many tense moments, as Nat's skills and the Sister's calm demeanor sometimes work against each other. 

I found the book captivating, and wanted to know how things worked out. There were many surprises. 

Soul of the Desert

Finished April 21
Soul of the Desert by Maria Schneider

This book is set in the 1970s and 80s, with Rand, a young Harlem hoodlum trying to protect his little brother Bo from the life he is caught up in. When chance throws Christina, an ambitious young Latino woman and her coworker into his clutches, he negotiates a way out for Bo.
Christina takes Bo back to New Mexico where she grew up, and places him on the ranch with her parents as his caregivers.
Bo hopes that Rand will eventually be able to join him there, as Rand and Christina work out a clandestine way to keep in touch while trying to minimize the possibility that Bo will be found by the rival gangs back East.
But the drug trade reaches everywhere and it soon shows up in the school that Bo now goes to, and during his high school years he becomes involved in a way he never would have anticipated, and that his new family has reservations about.
This is a tale of a young boy trying for a fresh start, but having to overcome culture shock, prejudice, and a completely new enviroment.
It grew on me as I got further into it.

The Wives of Los Alamos

Finished March 26
The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit

This novel has a very different structure. Nesbit did a fair bit of research on Los Alamos and the women who lived there with their scientist husbands, and came up with an approach that spoke to all the women, spoke from a first person point of view, but in a group sense, and felt very personal.
Each chapter has a different theme, and is made up of short paragraphs around that theme. Within each paragraph, the voice offers different experiences in the same vein, some of them opposite to each other. These speak both to the range of backgrounds of the women, as well as the commonalities.
Living in this small community, forced to interact with each other, with only a partial understanding of what their husbands were working on, very limited access to the outside world, and assigned housing with undependable utilities, these women were creative, feisty, and good sports.
I could barely put this book down, it did such a good job of pulling me into the experience of Los Alamos.
Here are a few examples to give you a taste of the way this book is written.
From the chapter "West":

We lied and told our children we were packing because we would be spending August with their grandparents in Denver or Duluth. Or we said we did not know where we were going, which was the truth, but our children, who did not trust that adults went places without knowing where they were going, thought we were lying. Or we told them it was an adventure and they would find out when we got there.

and from the chapter "Land":

In that first week we were invited to learn how to run our clothes through the hand-cranked mangle at the community laundry. Before this, we had other people do our laundry, or we had electric wringers, and for many of us our memories of those hand-powered water extractors were of the heavy crank and our mother's warnings not to get our hair caught in it. We were still wearing high heels and they stuck in the mud and we pretended that we learned what we were taught about the mangle but instead gathered our husband's shirts in a wet bundle and carried them home, smiling sourly. We hung the clothes on the line and ironed the cotton shirts on our kitchen table. Because our clothesline was erected in one of the only spots on the mesa that was not in direct sunlight, in the morning we brought our children's cloth diapers and our husband's boxer shorts in as square little ice boards.

and from the chapter "Talk":

We were a group of people connecting both honestly and dishonestly, appearing composed at dusk and bedraggled at daybreak, committed, whether we wanted it or not, to shared conditions of need, agitation, and sometimes joy, which is to say: we were a community.

There is just something about this writing that takes the individual and group experiences of these women and makes them come alive for me. I feel their frustration, their loneliness, their anger. It opened my eyes to another historical experience, one that could never happen now due to the advances in communication, and makes you feel what it might have been like.