The Hummingbird's Daughter [Paperback]

I read a lot of books. Some are just for fun, some are silly, some are educational, some are not very good. But, every now and then, I find one that is so special that I will read it again, and probably again a few more times.

You can read a "summary" of the book in other reviews, both publishers' and readers'. So, why did I like it and why should you read it.

First, the story is incredible. A child born in poverty begins to show amazing intelligence, skills...and grows to womanhood having had profound effect on her country of birth. Truth is indeed "stranger than fiction".

Second, the author has an amazing talent with words. He gives you the sights, sounds, smells of the world in which Teresita lived. He also uses words to bring each person to life. I actually called a friend to share a quote...Tomas Urrea to Lauro Aguirre...."Although it is true that you are insufferable and irritating, and rightly famed for your endless posturing and platudinous pontificating..." (don't worry, potential reader, though, the book is not full of big words, just, occasionally, one creeps in...I loved that quote because it reminded me of someone.)

Third, I was able to experience a time and place distant from me. Some of what happened was horrific, but, it happened. I was able to begin to understand.

Finally, I loved this book, and will read it again because it contains a message of love and hope that I can understand.

Books do many things, entertain, enlighten and sometimes enrich.

This book enriches, enlightens and entertains.

In Latin America, instead of saying "to give birth to", the people say "para dar a luz", to bring to the light. Luis Urrea has brought to the light his remarkable great-aunt, La Teresita, a curandera who came to be known as la Santa de Cabora. His painstaking research has resulted in what I can only term a biography written in the style of magical realism. (I've never been able to understand the difference between magic and realism in the first place.) This book is part cultural anthropology, part Mexican history, and wholly enchanting. Urrea is a powerful, masterly writer who sure knows his stuff. He brings his readers to the light of understanding, of feeling, of acknowledgement. I think he may have inherited some of his ancestor's talent for transformation.

Teresita Urrea was a real person. She is buried in a small town in eastern Arizona, where I spent some time growing up. I went to her graveside at age 17, looking only for cheap thrills. (We thought back then that the grave contained the body of a woman who had fought in the Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa, and whose ghost was rumored to haunt the cemetary.) I wanted to be scared. Instead, on that bitterly cold November night, I found the air around her grave to be soft and warm, and I could smell roses. No roses bloom in the Clifton cemetary in November. Instead of being frightened, I came away with what was then an inexplicable sense of peace. I didn't understand at the time, but now I do. Her healing ways still linger.

Luis Urrea has given us the spirit of La Teresa, warm, alive, and still wearing the scent of roses. I loved reading this book. You will too.

Not since I read Mario Vargas Llosa's THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD several years ago have I come across a novel whose characters, story, and general aura captivated me so completely that I was sorry to see it come to its inevitable end. Until I read THE HUMMINGBIRD'S DAUGHTER.

Luis Alberto Urrea proves himself to be a consummate storyteller, creating a cast of memorable characters whose intersecting lives blend the traditions of hacienda-owning, Christian Mexico with the pantheistic mysticism of Indian Mexico. Urrea depicts Mexico's ironic mixture of warmth and harshness through countless small touches and turns of phrase, creating a remarkably strong sense of place. In fact, Mexico itself becomes one of the book's major characters - its people, its history, its austere and unforgiving climate and geography. The end result is a novel that traces the evolution of Mexico in the late 1800's and the birth of the modern Mexican state in an America-dominated age. It is no coincidence that a book so deeply rooted in Mexico at its beginning ends a number of years later in a train headed for the United States.

The Hummingbird is Cayetana, a poor but strong-willed woman who gives birth to a daughter. Believing that the choice of name will dictate her child's future, Cayetana christens her daughter Nina Garcia Nona Maria Rebecca Chavez. The Hummingbird abandons her daughter at an early age, leaving her with her aunt and disappearing from sight. The young girl, unusually bright and inquisitive, is eventually given over to the tutelage of Huila, the estancia's resident midwife, medicine woman, and all-around mystical healer. As if to prove her absent mother correct even if her choice of names was wrong, the young girl rechristens herself as Theresa, after Saint Theresa. "I am going to be her," she explains to the dubious Huila.

Theresa's father, we soon discover, is Tomas Urrea, the rich landowner of the Sinaloan estate where they live. Teresita, as she is called, demonstrates mystical powers exceeding those of her teacher, to the point where she becomes widely known as a faith healer and ultimately a threat to a ruthless but inexplicably skittish government. Urrea's characters are beautifully drawn, from the saintly Teresita to the cranky but lovable Huila, from the liberal-thinking Tomas to his jewel- and tradition-encrusted wife Dona Loreto, from the radical but inventive engineer Don Lauro Aguirre to the scampish boy Buenaventura (another of Tomas's illegitimate children) and the honor-bound outlaw, Cruz Chavez.

While Urrea's prose is neither as dense nor as introspective as Garcia Marquez's or Cormac McCarthy's, his storytelling flows at a graceful pace that easily sustains the reader's interest. The writing is filled with small touches that evoke the sights and sounds and smells of rural Mexico: "Segundo shifted in the saddle, and it made its three hundred leather sounds." Then there are the cruel oddities of Mexico, such as the rural policemen who travel the countryside exhibiting the floating head of a captured bandit as a way to intimidate the peasants into obedience, or the Hummingbird's sister, Tia, whose smoking habit includes flicking the burnt ash on her tongue as though it was a naturally consumable part of the cigarette.

Best of all, however, are the stories and traditions Urrea integrates into the people's daily lives, such as the fabled visit of the Virgin Mary to Teresa's ancestors. Mary's heavenly descent ends with the Mother of God stuck on top of a huge cactus, from where she spoke. "What did she say?" Teresa asks. "Get me a ladder," Huila answers. And that's what the people did for the Mother of God. "This is how Heaven works," Huila explains. "They're practical. We are always looks for rays of light. For lightning bolts or burning bushes. But God is a worker, like us. He made the world - He didn't hire poor Indios to build it for him! God has worker's hands. Just remember - angels carry no harps. Angels carry hammers."

Readers who want to be immersed in a story, lose themselves in another place and time and culture, and allow the marvel of great fiction to transport them to a world both forever lost and beyond their own, will surely enjoy THE HUMMINGBIRD'S DAUGHTER. Like me, their only regret will probably be reaching the 495th and last page.

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