Brooding with Storm Clouds: Return to Oaxaca

"What you feel at sixteen, you wander through life trying to feel again..."After twenty-six years, award-winning photographer Lena Mendel returns to Oaxaca, Mexico where, at sixteen, she spent a transformational school year with six other girls. Now she's back with two classmates from that magical time along with her adolescent son Gabriel, bent on creating some independence from his mother's single parenthood.As the travelers savor Oaxaca's daring fireworks and romantic serenades, an unexpected encounter unearths a deeply hidden secret that challenges Lena's autonomy, exposes the shadowy politics of this dazzling city, and changes the lives of mother and son forever. Then Gabe seeks to remain in Oaxaca.Within the crucible of Oaxaca's massive 2006 strike and the brutal repression of those organizing for their rights, Lena and Gabe realize a new relation to themselves, each other, and to this troubled land.What Readers ThinkWhat a story! What a place and time! What multilayered characters-Lena and Benjamín and Gabe and Raúl and all the others! What a world you invite us into-of color and sensuality and passion and intellect-a world also of idealism and tragedy...a work of great power.- Philip B. Kunhardt III, author of Looking For Lincoln: The Making of an American IconThis beautiful novel reads like a love letter to Oaxaca. Framed by dramatic sociopolitical upheaval, Gold's captivating story of family and friendship brims with heartache, secrets, and most of all, love.- Laura Resau, author of What the Moon Saw, set in Oaxaca, among twelve other booksLuscious. Brilliant. A perfect weaving of motherhood, precolonial history, and the politics of education in Mexico.- Etta Kralovec, Ed.D, Founding Director of the Borderlands Education Center