The Flower in the Skull - Softcover

Alcala, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156006340 ISBN 13: 9780156006347

Publisher: Mariner Books, 1999

Synopsis

Deep in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico in the 1870s, a village of Opata Indians is attacked by soldiers. Along with the rest of her tribe, Concha is driven from her homeland and eventually finds her way to Tucson, where she finds a job cleaning houses and caring for children. When her own daughter, Rosa, is born, the legacy of Concha's dislocation continues, as Rosa is raised far from her native culture and struggles to find her place in a strange world. As she did in her acclaimed, award-winning novel, Spirits of the Ordinary, Kathleen Alcalá takes on the complexities of cultural heritage, identity, and assimilation, and explores the mysterious nature of place, spiritualism, and faith in the lives of these extraordinary ordinary people.

About this title

About the Author:

Kathleen Alcal is the author of Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist and Spirits of the Ordinary, a highly praised novel that received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award. Born in California of Mexican parents, she lives near Seattle, Washington.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Alcal's overly ambitious latest, the second part of a planned trilogy that began with Spirits of the Ordinary (1997), spans more than a century in offering a view of three women linked by Indian blood and their dreams, and seared by the violent transgressions of men. Childhood comforts in her Opata village in Sonoran Mexico cease for Concha when her father is seized by Mexican soldiers and never seen again. First abandoning home with her family, then herself abandoned by her mother, Concha walks in a daze across the desert to Tucson, where she's taken in as a nanny by a prospering Mexican family. A measure of peace returns to her. But when she's raped by an Anglo and has his child, nothing can ever be the same. A brief marriage fails to produce more children, so her husband dallies with someone else, leaving Concha and daughter Rosa to fend for themselves. Over the years, Rosa picks up the burden when her mother grows too weak to continue the dawn-to-dusk housecleaning work that has sustained them, but then Rosa catches the eye of a young minister and receives Concha's blessing to marry him just before Concha dies. Busy starting her own family and keeping her own house, Rosa still wonders about her mother's past--and the father she never knew. Two generations forward, Shelly, an editorial assistant for an L.A. publisher, jumps at the chance to escape her stalking, harassing boss by going on a research trip to Tucson, where she finds not only a mystery involving her mother's family and her people in a broader sense, but also the will to survive the horror waiting for her when she returns to Los Angeles. A thin stretch of a story, with scattered lyric beauty. This might fill a gap between more substantial efforts, but can't hold interest on its own. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0156006340
• ISBN 13: 9780156006347
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192