Rudolfo A Anaya

Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.

Because Rattlesnake has taken over the road and will not let any of the people or animals in the village use it, Desert Woman enlists the aid of the other animals to create a strange new creature with the necessary tools to overcome Rattlesnake.

In Albuquerque, Chicano PI Sonny Baca, who normally pursues absentee fathers, goes after the killers of a former girlfriend whose blood was drained while she was still alive, a probe that takes him through the many cultures of the Southwest. By the author of Bless Me, Ultima.

"Mythmaker, master storyteller, and a writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya is one of the undisputed fathers of Chicano literature. Writing in an era when Latino voices were marginalized and just beginning to be read and acknowledged, Anaya broke new ground with Bless Me, Ultima (1972), a mythic novel that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest....

""The world is full of sorrow," Agapita whispered to Alfonso. Did she stamp those words into his destiny? The story of Alfonso, a Neuvo Mexicano, begins with his birth, when the curandera Agapita delivers these haunting words into his infant ear. When then unfolds is an elegiac song to the Ilanos of New Mexico where Alfonso comes of age."--Dust jacket.