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indexReview by JJ Amaworo Wilson

As debut collections go, give or take the odd Junot Diaz or Ray Carver, this is about as good as it gets. The writing is measured and beautiful, witty yet restrained, and there’s not a single dud among these tales.

The ten stories that make up Night at the Fiestas, set in the badlands or sometimes just sleepy lands of New Mexico, resonate with pain and fear and lives gone awry. And the characters, usually young, female and on the cusp of some hard-earned wisdom, are unforgettable.

The best story in the collection – and you can expect to see it reprinted in anthologies for … oh … perhaps the next hundred years – is “The Five Wounds.” Serial loser and absent father Amadeo gets to play the condemned Jesus in his town’s pageant. He bears the cross, literally and metaphorically, for his life has been one long procession of sin and failure. Amadeo’s most famous precursor, Manuel Garcia, had real nails driven into him back in 1962 and “hasn’t been able to open or close his hands since.” As Amadeo walks the Way of Sorrows, accompanied by his neglected and pregnant daughter and the hermanos who will nail him, too, the story takes off and becomes a timeless tale of redemption.

Valdez Quade has an exquisite eye for detail and a superb ear for the rhythms of Spanish-inflected English. She also gets adolescent thought patterns and lingo just right. Take this exchange from the title story:

“… he asked me to dine with him tonight.”

“To dine? What is he, an aristocrat?” But Nancy was looking Frances up and down, impressed.

“Of course I told him I couldn’t. He must be nearly thirty.”

The collection is full of rich dialogue and scenes of perfectly-judged squalor. “Mojave Rats” envisions a family living in a camper van in a paltry desert community, the father doing Ph.D research while the mother, surrounded by dysfunctional neighbors and a sea of dust, tries not to lose her mind.

In “The Guesthouse,” Jeff discovers his father – a chronic drunk – has been living in Jeff’s deceased grandmother’s guesthouse with an enormous boa constrictor and a cage full of rats. Family relationships constitute a major theme of this collection, but there isn’t a drop of sentimentality in sight. Fathers are absent or useless, and sons and daughters eye them with the suspicion of the already-damaged.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It will garner a bucketful of prizes and it represents what I believe will be the beginning of a major literary career.

Disclaimer:
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Southwest Word Fiesta™ or its steering committee.

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We respectfully acknowledge that the entirety of southwestern New Mexico is the traditional territory, since time immemorial, of the Chis-Nde, also known as the people of the Chiricahua Apache Nation. The Chiricahua Apache Nation is recognized as a sovereign Native Nation by the United States in the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Friendship of 1 July 1852 (10 Stat. 979) (Treaty of Santa Fe ratified 23 March 1853 and proclaimed by President Franklin Pierce 25 March 1853).

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Mimbres Press of Western New Mexico University is a traditional academic press that welcomes agented and unagented submissions in the following genres: literary fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, memoir, poetry, children’s books, historical fiction, and academic books. We are particularly interested in academic work and commercial work with a strong social message, including but not limited to works of history, reportage, biography, anthropology, culture, human rights, and the natural world. We will also consider selective works of national and global significance.