San Antonio College Library

Fourteen-year-old Clara Luna spends the summer with her grandparents in the tiny, remote village of Yucuyoo, Mexico, learning about her grandmother's life as a healer, her father's decision to leave home for the United States, and her own place in the world.

In her customary crystalline prose Harriet Doerr examines the lives of four North American expatriates in a small Mexican village of a thousand souls. Set on the barren mesa of Amapolas, we see the newcomers settling in their adobe houses and gradually adjusting to an environment of excesses - hot sun, torrential downpour, sweeping landscapes, and a vastness of untouched nature - and watch as each is drawn into the aura of this land and changed. For...