If bones could talk
One novel explores the tricks of long-buried memory — another pines for a lost era of magic
LOST IN A PLACE SO SMALL By Rick Collignon Conundrum: Bower House (2021, 209 pp.)
“How many bad things could happen in one family?”
So wonders one of the residents of the tiny drought-stricken village of Guadalupe, nestled in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where families have dug in for as long as anyone can remember — and memory is deep and tricky.
Will Sawyer, the aging protagonist of this slyly suspenseful novel, having lived in the village a mere 30 years and still considered an outsider, comes upon a cache of what seems like bones of a child in the decrepit adobe Manuela Garcia has asked him to fix up before she dies. The falling down structure just up the hill from her own house once belonged to her grandfather, by all accounts a solitary, implacable character, and a very bad man.
The vieja Garcia asks Will to do this task for her because he seems to “know some of the old stories. Stories that most people have forgotten or never heard.”
What is the story behind the buried bones in the grandfather’s adobe — and why does Will sense that the whole village knows it already?
In this fifth novel by author Collignon, returning to the familiar terrain and characters of previous work such as “Perdido” and “A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal Garcia,” he quietly builds on the steady character of Will, a roofer-handyman now married to Estrella, and with two young daughters. Will, a taciturn soul from back East, has by now become part of the unchangeable high desert landscape, a convenient listener to the old guys at Tito’s Bar with nothing left but tragic grievances to regurgitate.
“Some things should be forgotten,” Estrella’s 96-year-old grandmother warns her darkly, when her granddaughters ask her to tell them about the olden days.
In Collignon’s artful, pensive narrative, the past is a crouched menace, just waiting to jump out and grab you.
CITY OF VILLAINS By Estelle Laure Disney/Hyperion (2021, 232 pp.)
Laure’s wildly imaginative young adult novel is set in a post-apocalyptic city where “magic is dead and wishes don’t come true anymore” — except when one teenager finds true love.
Monarch City has witnessed the Fall, when an epic structure called the
Wand collapsed by nefarious forces, sucking all the magic with it, into a huge lake of negative energy and pitting the classes of old-school Legacy against the gentrifying Narrows. The two enemies are vying for the soul of a once-enchanting neighborhood now sadly known as the Scar.
Seventeen-year-old high school senior Mary Elizabeth Heart is from a Legacy family struck by tragedy when her parents and sister were senselessly murdered when she was 7. An afterschool intern with Monarch’s police department, thanks to the mentorship of the chief who solved her family’s murder, Mary is put on the case of two missing Legacy girls, who happen to be friends from her high school.
What author and local teacher Laure (“Mayhem,” “This Raging Light”) manages to create in her swiftmoving narrative is a whole hierarchy of distinctive characters, from the sassy, sartorially whimsical junior detective Bella Loyola to Mary’s boyfriend, James, aka Captain Crook, a good boy from a crime family who still has that devilish hint that makes him irresistible. And meet a raven with attitude named Hellion.
Laure plays on some of the classic Disney villains here for a vertiginous plunge into a compelling fantasy for readers of all ages.
THE HOUSE OF CYLINDER JARS Edited by Patricia L. Crown Univ. of New Mexico Press (2020, 240 pp.)
Room 28 in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, at the heart of the Four Corners and a center of Mesoamerican culture, was first excavated in 1896, and found to contain 112 cylindrical jars.
In 2009, UNM anthropologist Patricia L. Crown and her crew discovered traces of cacao in the jars, and then
in 2013 reopened the site to answer some persistent questions about the ancient ritual use in the drinking of chocolate — and why the room seems to have been burned purposefully, as if in a “termination” ceremony circa AD 1100.
The cacao was brought more than 2,000 kilometers from the tropics of Mesoamerica, evidence of the wide trading practices of the people. Moreover, Crown unearths evidence from Room 28 that the ceramic cacaodrinking vessels “were revered and feared as powerful objects.”
Learn more about these fascinating Mesoamerican chocolate-drinking rituals in a talk by the author on Thursday (Jan. 28) at 10-11 a.m. The talk is free, but register at: sarsf.info/ booktalkcylinderjars.
For more about the book, go to unmpress.com/books/house-cylinderjars/9780826361776.