ARROYO

Willie Lee Woolston, a down-and-out blues singer, hopes to retrieve something she left behind in Los Fuegos, a small New Mexican town she once hitchhiked through. What she recovers instead in this insightful, well-crafted debut novel is her voice and a new understanding of love and loyalty. When Willie moves to Los Fuegos, where people's lives depend on the health of their crops and the copper mine, her height and flaming red hair don't exactly help her blend in with the local Mexican-American families. But she gradually gets to know her new neighbors, a process accelerated when a disaster at the copper mine forces all to come together. Wood writes with a delicate intensity, her descriptions of the harsh yet beautiful land mirroring the strength and vulnerability of her characters. The arroyo, a dry creek that runs through the landscape, exemplifies the many literal and figurative scars the characters bear—Chavela's mysterious facial scar, Genio's motherless childhood, Hector's secret crime and his missing brother. Wood has a poet's sense of timing and structure, loosening grammatical rules to enliven an otherwise simple story. Missing articles and subjects, nouns used as verbs, and scrambled chronological order syncopate the pacing to compelling and dizzying effect. Wood's affectionate portrayals overcome a few Chicano stereotypes of machismo and frailty, and she is surprisingly insightful about the emotional life of people of different ages, genders and backgrounds. This is a fetching, original first novel, recognizing that profound events don't necessarily mean profound life changes, but signal the need to keep moving on. (June)

Forecast:A joint tour of the West with John Nichols (author of The Milagro Beanfield War and the forthcoming Voice of the Butterfly; he also blurbs Wood's book) will drum up a local readership; good reviews may draw a few more readers.