Night at the Fiestas
By Kirstin Valdez Quade
288 pages;
W. W. Norton & Company
In the title story of Kirstin Valdez Quade's
polished and potent collection, a summer festival packs the streets of Santa Fe
as a young girl tests the limits of her brand-new independence. Around her,
party-goers swarm in pursuit of "Zozobra,
the looming white marionette," which has been stuffed with legal documents
and other records of past suffering and set on fire, lifting a symbolic weight
from the shoulders of the crowd. But throughout these stories, set mostly in
and around the New Mexico city, the past cannot be so easily burned away. Quade's
characters belong to families where love and injury are interlocked, and where
religious rites expose private pains to the public gaze. Two cousins, raised as
sisters, are trapped in a helpless rivalry that comes to a head at the Corpus
Christi feast, and in the searing "The Five Wounds," a father's
reenactment of the passion of Christ turns into an act of penitence after his
teenage daughter shows up on his doorstep, "belly as hard and round as an
adobe horno." Rooted deeply in place and ringing with authentic voices,
these gripping stories confront the hardest human questions of how to love,
trust and forgive.
— Joanna Scutts