Full Description
Winner of the 2024 NM-AZ Book Award for Best First Book-Arizona
Gold Medal Winner for the 2024 Will Rogers Medallion
Finalist for the 2024 NM-AZ Book Award for Best Fiction-Historical Arizona
Finalist for the 2023 Laramie Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Best Book Awards from American Book Fest
Finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award
Finalist for the 2023 Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award for Best First Western Novel
Finalist for the 2023 Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award for Best Western Novel
Longlisted for the 2023 Goethe Book Award
Arizona Territory, 1871. Valeria ObregÓn and her ambitious husband, RaÚl, arrive in the raw frontier town of Tucson hoping to find prosperity. Changing Woman, an Apache spirit who represents the natural order of the world and its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, welcomes Nest Feather, a twelve-year-old Apache girl, into womanhood in Aravaipa Canyon.
Mexican and Anglo settlers have pushed the Apaches from their lands, and the Apaches carry out raids against them. In turn, the settlers, angered by the failure of the U.S. government and the military to protect them, respond with a murderous raid on an Apache encampment under the protection of the U.S. military at Camp Grant, kidnapping Nest Feather and other Apache children.
In Tucson, while Valeria finds fulfillment in her work as a seamstress, RaÚl struggles to hide from her his role in the bloody attack, and Nest Feather, adopted by a Mexican couple there, tries to hold on to her Apache heritage in a culture that rejects her very being. Against the backdrop of the massacre trial, Valeria and Nest Feather's lives intersect in the church, as Valeria seeks spiritual guidance for the decision she must make and Nest Feather prepares for a Christian baptism.
