Night at the Fiestas

8 of 10
Night at the Fiestas
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