A modern classic for our time and for all time―this beloved, award-winning bestseller resonates with fresh meaning for each new generation. Perfect for fans of Kate DiCamillo, Christopher Paul Curtis, and Rita Williams-Garcia.

Pura Belpre Award Winner

* Readers will be swept up. -Publishers Weekly, starred review

Esperanza thought she'd always live a privileged life on her family's ranch in Mexico. She'd always have fancy dresses, a beautiful home filled with servants, and Mama, Papa, and Abuelita to care for her. But a sudden tragedy forces Esperanza and Mama to flee to California and settle in a Mexican farm labor camp. Esperanza isn't ready for the hard work, financial struggles brought on by the Great Depression, or lack of acceptance she now faces. When Mama gets sick and a strike for better working conditions threatens to uproot their new life, Esperanza must find a way to rise above her difficult circumstances--because Mama's life, and her own, depend on it.

A warm and witty saga about agribusiness, environmental activism, and community--from the celebrated author of The Book of Form and Emptiness and A Tale for the Time Being

Yumi Fuller hasn't set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho--heart of the potato-farming industry--since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama. The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping car, The Spudnick, biofueled by pilfered McDonald's french-fry oil. Following her widely hailed, award-winning debut novel, My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki returns here to deliver a quirky cast of characters and a wickedly humorous appreciation of the foibles of corporate life, globalization, political resistance, youth culture, and aging baby boomers. All Over Creation tells a celebratory tale of the beauty of seeds, roots, and growth--and the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.

Letitia holds nothing more dear than the papers that prove she is no longer a slave. They may not cause white folks to treat her like a human being, but at least they show she is free. She trusts in those words she cannot read--as she is beginning to trust in Davey Carson, an Irish immigrant cattleman who wants her to come west with him.

Nancy Hawkins is loathe to leave her settled life for the treacherous journey by wagon train, but she is so deeply in love with her husband that she knows she will follow him anywhere--even when the trek exacts a terrible cost.

Betsy is a Kalapuya Indian, the last remnant of a once proud tribe in the Willamette Valley in Oregon territory. She spends her time trying to impart the wisdom and ways of her people to her grandson. But she will soon have another person to care for.

As season turns to season, suspicion turns to friendship, and fear turns to courage, three spirited women will discover what it means to be truly free in a land that makes promises it cannot fulfill. This multilayered story from bestselling author Jane Kirkpatrick will grip readers' hearts and minds as they travel with Letitia on the dusty and dangerous Oregon trail into the boundless American West.

While harvesting yucca plants to make paper, China Bayles finds a body-cause of death: unknown. It seems that the simple lives of many residents of Pecan Springs hide complex and dangerous pasts. And now, while also unraveling secrets that hit close to home, China must set the record straight- and find a killer.

She never shot a husband who didn't deserve it.

A small band of Wild West cowgirls rode into stardom around the turn of the 20th century, earning nearly as much as the cowboys in the traveling shows and often out-performing them. At a time when women were discouraged from working outside the home or exercising, the Wild West cowgirls became fabulously popular stars who drew huge audiences and fans. Women around the world admired them for their audacity to lead lives outside the norm. They are some of history's forgotten women.

Goldie Griffith was one of that group of early professional female athletes. She performed tricks and rode bucking broncos for the most famous showman of the time, Buffalo Bill. At the age of 19, she was married during one of his Wild West shows at Madison Square Garden before a crowd of 8,000 whistling and stomping fans. A few years later, she discovered that her cowboy husband had already been married when they wed, and she pulled out her gun.

A WILLA Literary Award finalist for creative non-fiction.

Natchez, Mississippi, in 1933 is a place suspended in time. The silver and china is still dented and cracked from Yankee invaders. And the houses have names...and memories. Nora Bondurant is running away--from her husband's death, from his secrets, and from the ghosts that dog her every step. When she receives a telegram informing her that she has an inheritance, Nora suddenly has somewhere to run to: a house named Avoca in Natchez, Mississippi. Now, she's learning that the lure of Natchez runs deep, and that, along with Avoca, she's inherited a mystery. Nora's aunt Amalia Bondurant was killed in a murder/suicide, and the locals are saying nothing more--except in hushed, honeyed tones. As Nora becomes more and more enmeshed in the community and in her family's history, she learns surprising things about the life and death of her aunt: kinship isn't always what it seems, loyalty can be as fierce as blood relations, and every day we are given new mercies to heal the pain of loss and love.

254 pages, 4 3/4 x 8 inches, paperback, first volume in the South Dakota Biography Series

Aware that her youth is slipping by, Mary Beth Baptiste decides to escape her lackluster, suburban life in coastal Massachusetts to pursue her lifelong dream of being a Rocky Mountain woodswoman. To the horror of her traditional, ethnic family, she divorces her husband of fifteen years, dusts off her wildlife biology degree, and flees to Moose, Wyoming for a job at Grand Teton National Park. In these rugged mountains, unexpected lessons from nature and wildlife guide her journey as she creates a new life for herself. Set against the dramatic backdrop and quirky culture of Jackson Hole, this beautifully written memoir is a thoughtful, often humorous account of a woman's bumbling quest for purpose, redemption, and love through wilderness adventure, solitude, and offbeat human connections.

Father O'Malley and Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden return When a sacred tribal artifact disappears from a museum, it's more than Arapaho history that is lost--it's an Arapaho student's life...

Ranching is a life of extremes, perhaps even more so on the high plains near Laramie, Wyoming. And no one knows that better than Gwen Swan, who married both her husband Will and his family ranch where she works hard beside the men and struggles to raise her two children. Meg Braeburn, who has broken away from her family's ranch, expects unrelenting hard work when she takes a job on the place neighboring the Swans'. She and her son face an uncertain future, but she is determined to leave the past behind and make a good life for them. Gwen, who understands the corrosive effects of isolation better than Meg, includes Meg in her family and community and wins Meg's gratitude and support. But there is little time for reflection on anyone's part as the wheel of the seasons grinds relentlessly onward bringing disasters and triumphs and a a rough road for all concerned. The prodigal Swan son returns and relationships shift, old resentments resurface and friendships are strained and tested as everyone finds themselves struggling against the elements and each other to continue their way of life. In this remarkable debut novel the author presents us with fully formed characters that ring as clear and true as the picture of ranch life she paints as a background for the universal struggles we all confront.

An amazingly drawn portrait of small town souls. . . . Turner is adept at creating characters with an unsetting undercurrent that suggests none are whom they seem to be. --Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Rare is the gift of a writer who is able to conjure up the voices of very different worlds, to give them heat and power and make them sing. Such is the talent of Nancy E. Turner. Her beloved and award-winning first novel, These Is My Words, opened readers to the challenges of a woman's life in the nineteenth-century Southwest. Now this extraordinary writer shifts her gaze to a very different world--East Texas in the years of the Second World War--and to the life of a young woman named Philadelphia Summers, known against her will as Frosty.

From the novel's harrowing opening scene, Frosty's eyes survey the landscape around her--white rural America--with the awestruck clarity of an innocent burned by sin. In her mother and sisters she sees fear and small-mindedness; in the eyes of local boys she sees racial hatred and hunger for war. When that war finally comes, it offers her a chance for escape--to California, and the caring arms of Gordon Benally a Native-American soldier. But when she returns to Texas she must face the rejection of a town still gripped by suspicion--and confront the memory of the crime that has marked her soul since adolescence.

Propelled by the quiet power of one woman's voice, The Water and the Blood is a moving and unforgettable portrait of an America of haunted women and dangerous fools--an America at once long perished and with us still.

Betsy Watry tells the tales of a dozen women, some of whom had short-lived adventures in Yellowstone National Park, but most of whom spent decades as rangers, scientists, interpreters, and entrepreneurs, shaping the Park's physical and cultural landscape. This is a wonderful 'hidden' history, full of surprising stories, grounded in intensive research and written with charm.

--Dr. Mary Murphy, historian and author of Hope in Hard Times

For so long, Yellowstone National Park has needed a book about the women who stood and today stand tall in its history. At long last, Elizabeth Watry has produced it. Women across the nation should celebrate this book for its noteworthy contribution to women's history, as we professional historians do.

Lee Whittlesey, Park Historian, National Park Service, --Yellowstone National Park

To read about Yellowstone National Park too often means viewing it through the eyes and exploits of men. By sharing the experiences and contributions of women who visited, lived, and worked in Yellowstone, Elizabeth Watry places women front and center in the Park's wondrous history. Women in Wonderland is sure to become a treasured resource.

--Diane Smith, author of Letters from Yellowstone

Hailed by Booklist as two talented authors who vividly bring to life the beauty of New Mexico and its people, Sue Boggio and Mare Pearl return in A Growing Season to Esperanza, New Mexico, the setting of their first book, Sunlight and Shadow. Esperanza is a community at the crossroads where a devastating drought threatens the farming community's very survival. Vultures circle in the form of developers who see failing farms as ripe pickings for a bedroom community for Albuquerque. Court battles pit the endangered silvery minnow against the farmers as the once mighty Rio Grande shrinks from its banks even as demand for its precious water increases.

Devoted wife and mother. Acclaimed novelist, illustrator, and interpreter of the American West. At a time when society expected women to concentrate on family and hearth, Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) published twelve novels, four short story collections, almost two dozen stories and essays, and innumerable illustrations. In Mary Hallock Foote, Darlis A. Willer examines the life of this gifted and spirited woman from the East as she adapted herself and her artistic vision to the West.

Foote's images of the American West differed sharply from those offered by male artists and writers of the time. She depicted a more gentle West, a domestic West of families and settlements rather than a Wild West of soldiers, American Indians, and cowboys. Miller examines how Foote's career was molded by the East-West tensions she experienced throughout her adult life and by society's expectations of womanhood and motherhood.

This biography recounts Foote's Quaker upbringing; her education at the School of Design for Women at Cooper Union, New York; her marriage to Arthur De Wint Foote, including his alcohol problems; her life in Boise, Idaho, and later Grass Valley, California; her grief over the early death of daughter Agnes Foote; and the previously unexplored last two decades of her life.

Miller has made extensive use of every major archive of letters and documents by and about Foote. She sheds light on Foote's numerous stories, essays, and novels. And examines all pertinent sources on Foote's life and works.

Anyone interested in the American West, women's history, or life histories in general will find Miller's biography of Mary Hallock Foote fascinating,

As geologist Frankie MacFarlane prepares for her doctoral dissertation defense, two members of her committee are brutally attacked, one of them fatally. Meanwhile, the case on the supposedly deceased Geoff Travers is reopened, forcing Frankie to deal with the possibility that her former fiancé might still be alive. And, while working on a vertebrate fossil quarry, fellow student Dora Simpson is abducted. For her, time is running out. In the Mojave Desert, amid the arroyos and volcanic mesas of the Cady Mountains, Frankie finds the final pieces to these puzzles--and becomes the quarry. Fast-paced, yet lyrical and evocative, Quarry yields a cross-section of creatures as fascinating as the fossil beds its protagonist studies. The real mystery for Frankie MacFarlane fans is how to read this book slowly enough to savor Susan Cummins Miller's skillful prose and characterization. --Wynne Brown, author of More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Arizona Women Praise for previous Frankie MacFarlane Mysteries: A rollicking pentimento of fieldwork gone afoul!--Geotimes. Assured and erudite. --Publishers Weekly. A gripping thriller, exciting and eager to lure the reader into a labyrinth of human deceit. . . . Attention Hollywood--this is the stuff from which blockbuster movies can be made!--Midwest Book Review

Picturing a Different West addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women's tradition of the pictured West. Both Cather and Austin moved west in their youth and spent much of their lives there. Cather lived on the Great Plains, while Austin resided in California and the Southwest. Cather's travels repeatedly took her to the Southwest, and she wrote three novels with Southwestern settings. Starting with the masculine tradition of Western art that was prevalent when Austin and Cather launched their careers, Janis P. Stout shows how the authors challenged and revised that tradition. Rather than a West of adventure, violence, and conquest, open only to rugged and daring men, the authors envisioned a new West--not conventionally feminine so much as an androgynous space of freedom for women and men alike. Their vision of an alternative West and their alternative ways of thinking about and portraying gender are inseparable. Placing Cather and Austin alongside contemporaries Elsie Clews Parsons, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Laura Gilpin, Stout emphasizes the visual nature of Austin's and Cather's personal experiences of the West and Southwest, their awareness of the prevailing visual representations of the West, and the visual nature of their books about the West, with respect to both prose style and illustrations. In closing, Stout demonstrates the continuance of their tradition in illustrated western books by Leslie Marmon Silko and by Margaret Randall and Barbara Byers.

2005 Southwest Book Award * 2006 WILLA Literary Award Finalist A charming memoir. . . . While the legacy of [Lucy's] father's life is fragmented . . . her mother's background offers a brilliantly detailed picture of border life with its poverty brushed aside to allow joy--and the tantalizing smell of Mexican food--to enter. . . . Affectionate, articulate, and always straightforward.--Texas Books in Review Adds to the growing body of literary voices emerging from the border region of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. The uniqueness of Fisher-West's voice is found in her ability to represent the Rio Grande as a source that unites people rather than as a divide that separates two nations. Her story celebrates the rich complexity a bicultural, and in her case, international life offers.--Meredith E. Abarca, El Paso Times A delightful source of information about a way of Latino life that is sadly disappearing into the melting pot of Americana.--El Paso Inc. Lucy Fischer-West knows the power of birthplace and of borders and rivers. Her memoir begins with the story of her parents, one reared in Germany, the other in Mexico, and how they found each other on the Texas-Mexico border. Fischer-West's own journeys take her from her birth in the Hudson River Valley; to her upbringing on both sides of the Rio Grande; across the Atlantic to Scotland and then France; and finally to India's River Ganges, halfway around the world from the El Paso barrio where she grew up. Hers is an ordinary life made extraordinary by its path and by the people who, having touched and enriched her life, stay with her, as nurturing to her spirit as the rivers that help her mark time. By focusing not on the conflicts of border life but rather on everyday experiences made rich by her appreciation of them, Fischer-West honors her rivers and the people who travel them, cross them, live on their banks, and bathe in their waters. Her story touches on the emotions that bind us to others: anger, sorrow, equanimity, exuberance, and serenity. A true child of the Rio Grande, Lucy Fischer-West is a woman at home in the world. --Joyce Gibson Roach The clear voice of my paisana, Lucy Fischer-West, pleasurably transports me back to my native city, El Paso, Texas. The stories of her Mexican mother and German father, and her own international river-braided tales, enrich the complex literature of the border. --Pat Mora When one reads Lucy Fischer-West's Child of Many Rivers, one is not reading so much about the great rivers, vividly remembered, that have run through her rich and complex life and travels--the Rio Grande, the Hudson, the Clyde, the Ganges-but of the deeper currents that run through all our lives from their sacred sources: all the strong and generous women like the author and her mother, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who work bone-hard through the most difficult poverty, heartbreak and tragedy, who nourish and nurture our souls, who feed us their rich stories and make our deserts bloom. --Lex Williford

This poetry collection showcases all the features of Joan Logghe's work that have attracted so many readers: her attention to detail, her warmth, humor, and passionate and inclusive social conscience. At once postmodern and deeply rooted in her adopted northern New Mexico home, Logghe's work connects disparate events and objects.

I named my last child Hope. I never had a last child, she writes in the poem True or False.
Television Is the Golden Calf I read about
In Sabbath School. My teacher lied.
We live on the northern edge of the Sonorous desert.
Armageddon is a small lizard that reconstitutes at first rain.
Turtles have an aversion to helium because they are heavyhearted.

Joan Logghe is one of the most exciting poets in America today. Her words sing, slide, slip, & jive. I love everything by Joan.--Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones