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4.07 AVERAGE
4.07 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Dear Reader,
I grew up in the desert borderlands of Southern California, beside a toxic river that flowed to a deadly sea. Throughout my girlhood, I’d run through the dirt lot, past the date palms, beyond the horse pens, a bit further than the park, straight for the river, teeming with highlighter-yellow fish, glowing with poisons, where I’d dip my toes in anyway, daring the monsters in the molecules.
Seven years ago, when my children and I returned to my hometown, my comadre barbecued carne asada and told me that the Salton Sea had been drying up and releasing its toxic, wind-swept dust, threatening to transform El Valle into a wasteland within the next decade. We’ll all have to leave, she said. It’ll be a ghost town.
Our Ancestors knew the sea had been rising and falling for millennia. We followed the water. It had always been set to return. And would vanish again.
This drying, though, was different. In the hundred and twenty years since white settlers had created laws banning Native and Mexican people from buying our own land, they had also taken the water rights, creating a billion-dollar farming industry—money most people in El Valle never saw—and beginning a water war with the rest of the state. The big, coastal cities had siphoned the Colorado River water from our farming community, then allowed the runoff to burst through the 19th-century canals, creating a man-made lake—the “Salton Sink.” Now, the water’s inevitable evaporation was leaving a death trap of pesticide-laden dust behind. And no one was doing anything.
It was clear that the time had come to dust off an unfinished story, “Salt Bones,” a tale of siblings growing up on the so-called accidental sea in the desert—a place that had both uplifted and torn apart their family. For years, I had struggled to find my way into that story, and when my comadre shared the grim news of the Salton Sea’s fate, I retrieved these “Salt Bones” from a drawer and embarked on a journey of research and discovery.
I immersed myself in everything I could find about my predominantly Mexican farming community and the primarily white, wealthy elite who arrived after the late 1800s railroad boom, dividing the land through racist laws and practices. Despite the billions of dollars this land generates for California annually through agriculture, its people endure some of the highest poverty rates in the country.
And yet, so few people have any idea where the Valley is or how the Salton Sea and the politics surrounding it threaten to destroy not only their precious winter salad bars but an entire people and way of life.
The possibility that everyone and everything I’ve loved since girlhood could disappear and Americans would only notice that they had to eat canned vegetables during the winter ignited a fire within me. I felt a profound responsibility to live up to the high praise bestowed upon my work by El Maestro, Luis Alberto Urrea, who had called my first novel “the Great Mexicali novel.” I needed to speak up for my homeland again.
Over the past seven years, I’ve poured my heart and soul into rewriting this novel, a twisty murder mystery that takes readers on a haunted and at times harrowing journey. And yet, always, I’ve focused on the women. Like this place, ignored, forgotten, buried, disappeared, so too the women and girls, mothers and daughters. Our salt. Our bones.
I hope that within these pages, you will fall in love with El Valle and its inhabitants and realize, as Malamar does, that you can love and work for the well-being of a place even from afar.
All light in the darkness,
Jenn Givhan
I grew up in the desert borderlands of Southern California, beside a toxic river that flowed to a deadly sea. Throughout my girlhood, I’d run through the dirt lot, past the date palms, beyond the horse pens, a bit further than the park, straight for the river, teeming with highlighter-yellow fish, glowing with poisons, where I’d dip my toes in anyway, daring the monsters in the molecules.
Seven years ago, when my children and I returned to my hometown, my comadre barbecued carne asada and told me that the Salton Sea had been drying up and releasing its toxic, wind-swept dust, threatening to transform El Valle into a wasteland within the next decade. We’ll all have to leave, she said. It’ll be a ghost town.
Our Ancestors knew the sea had been rising and falling for millennia. We followed the water. It had always been set to return. And would vanish again.
This drying, though, was different. In the hundred and twenty years since white settlers had created laws banning Native and Mexican people from buying our own land, they had also taken the water rights, creating a billion-dollar farming industry—money most people in El Valle never saw—and beginning a water war with the rest of the state. The big, coastal cities had siphoned the Colorado River water from our farming community, then allowed the runoff to burst through the 19th-century canals, creating a man-made lake—the “Salton Sink.” Now, the water’s inevitable evaporation was leaving a death trap of pesticide-laden dust behind. And no one was doing anything.
It was clear that the time had come to dust off an unfinished story, “Salt Bones,” a tale of siblings growing up on the so-called accidental sea in the desert—a place that had both uplifted and torn apart their family. For years, I had struggled to find my way into that story, and when my comadre shared the grim news of the Salton Sea’s fate, I retrieved these “Salt Bones” from a drawer and embarked on a journey of research and discovery.
I immersed myself in everything I could find about my predominantly Mexican farming community and the primarily white, wealthy elite who arrived after the late 1800s railroad boom, dividing the land through racist laws and practices. Despite the billions of dollars this land generates for California annually through agriculture, its people endure some of the highest poverty rates in the country.
And yet, so few people have any idea where the Valley is or how the Salton Sea and the politics surrounding it threaten to destroy not only their precious winter salad bars but an entire people and way of life.
The possibility that everyone and everything I’ve loved since girlhood could disappear and Americans would only notice that they had to eat canned vegetables during the winter ignited a fire within me. I felt a profound responsibility to live up to the high praise bestowed upon my work by El Maestro, Luis Alberto Urrea, who had called my first novel “the Great Mexicali novel.” I needed to speak up for my homeland again.
Over the past seven years, I’ve poured my heart and soul into rewriting this novel, a twisty murder mystery that takes readers on a haunted and at times harrowing journey. And yet, always, I’ve focused on the women. Like this place, ignored, forgotten, buried, disappeared, so too the women and girls, mothers and daughters. Our salt. Our bones.
I hope that within these pages, you will fall in love with El Valle and its inhabitants and realize, as Malamar does, that you can love and work for the well-being of a place even from afar.
All light in the darkness,
Jenn Givhan