The Ghost of Milagro Creek

May 24, 2010
In her second novel, Sumner (The School of Beauty and Charm) crafts a convincing, despairing portrait of Taos, N.Mex. Ignacia Vigil Romero, a tough Jicarilla Apache medicine woman raising her grandson, Mister, uses charms and spells to aid in her motherly duties and to help her neighbors. After Ignacia succumbs to a long illness, there's no one to stop Mister and his best friend Tomas, who recently had a falling out with his lover, Rocky, from fulfilling their long-held suicide pact. Tomás's gun fails to fire, however, leaving Mister alive—and a murderer. Fleeing the police, Mister seeks Rocky to try and get answers. Sumner's cast and a strong sense of Native American and Latino spirituality create a fascinating portrait of a community, wrapping issues of alcoholism, friendship, parental neglect, and conflicted identity around a multidimensional tragedy. Passages narrated by Ignacia (as a living and dead character) possess appealing energy, though some other chapters—especially involving the police investigation—limp along. Readers will be fascinated by Sumner's Taos, but may find the central drama between Mister and Rocky unsatisfying.

April 15, 2010
Inseparable friends in a New Mexico barrio grow up to love the same woman and share a suicide pact.

Ethnicities, cultures, passions and beliefs clash portentously in Sumner's second novel (The School of Beauty and Charm, 2001, etc.), which drags epic, tragic themes into its portrait of a mixed community in Taos. Mister Romero, grandson of Ignacia, the local curandera (healer/witch/herbalist) with Jicarilla Apache and Tiwa origins, is the blood brother of Latino Tomás Mondragžn, son of an abusive, neglectful mother. At school, both fall under the spell of Anglo Raquel O'Brien from South Carolina, but it's Tomás who first becomes her boyfriend. Tomás, however, has violence in him and the relationship doesn't run smoothly, eventually allowing Mister Romero to have his chance with the girl he loved from first sight, although by then he will have blood on his hands. Sumner's jumbled chronology and mixture of narrative perspectives further muddles an impressionistic, busily populated story. The conclusion, similarly diffuse, offers natural justice to one character and apparently easy redemption to another.

An ambitiously complicated broth of content with surprisingly little flavor.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2010
A typical teenage love triangle takes a tragic turn in the barrio of Taos, New Mexico. The mysterious Rocky, a gringa in an almost entirely Hispanic/Native American community, sets two boys raised as brothers on a collision course. Through police reports, witness statements, interviews, and first-person narrative, the story is told and retold from various vantage points and in various time lines, and the suffering, mixed-race community becomes almost its own character as the plot points unravel and remix to tell the story. Well written, with intriguing characters, the novel illuminates a part of American society not often described in fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)