Grande’s ‘Ballad’ seduces with wartime love story

Reyna Grande’s third novel, “A Ballad of Love and Glory” (Atria, 384 pp., eeee), is a page-turner twofer – part romance, part war story – set during the Mexican-american War. It’s loosely based on the life of a soldier named John Riley, who is a historical novelist’s dream subject: An important figure whose story is known in broad strokes, but with plenty of gaps to fill in.

For instance, it’s a fact that Riley was an Irishman who, like many Europeans, served as a U.S. soldier in the 1840s in the fight against Mexico along the Rio Grande River. He left Ireland to escape privation there, but as Grande shows, nativist sentiment meant many foreign soldiers absorbed physical and verbal abuse. The “sauerkrauts” and “potatoheads” are humiliated, branded and murdered.

On the eve of the war in 1846, John crosses the river and joins the Mexican forces, who promise more honorable duties, better pay and a sympathetic

Catholic country. Mexico’s dream of independence, he believes, echoes his homeland’s. Soon he leads a group of soldiers called Saint Patrick’s Battalion from Matamoros to Mexico City in a noble but ultimately failed fight to keep Mexican territory. That’s all true – the “San Patricios” are honored annually in Mexico on St. Patrick’s Day.

But because little is known about John’s personal life, Grande is free to add a few twists. Chief among them is Ximena, a healer and widow of a Mexican soldier. She’s skeptical of war in general and of Riley’s cohort in particular: “Carnage and bloodshed, mutilation and suffering, all for fighting a war that isn’t even theirs to fight,” she thinks.

But naturally, the pair soon connect, both politically and intimately. If their romance is predictable, Grande is alert to numerous complications their relationship surfaces. Some are ethical (Riley has a wife back in Ireland), and some involve Ximena’s struggle to reconcile her hope for freedom with macho notions of heroism that killed her husband. And she seethes at Mexico’s factionalized politics, exemplified by Gen. Santa Anna, a callow opportunist she’s obliged to care for.

Stories about the border are dear to Grande. Her excellent 2012 memoir, “The Distance Between Us,” chronicles her childhood trek from Mexico to America, and her two previous novels focus on migrants.

In “Ballad,” her passion for the subject is palpable, as is her attention to detail about the battles of the Mexican-american War, in which Mexican soldiers were highly motivated but outmatched. It also is a fine allegory for imperialist moves in any age – the way, as Riley notes, that “a powerful nation will always hunger for more power.”

That message – and the core romance – might be stronger if the dialogue were less stiff. Ximena sighs to John about her dream of “a new Mexico. One ready to be the great nation it is destined to be.”

“I shall be a wanderer no longer,” John later sighs back.

Grande deserves credit, though, for writing a war story that doesn’t bog down into troop movements and empty patriotism. And a romance whose happily-ever-after leaves room for a few storm clouds.