The Ghost of Milagro Creek Book

Melanie Sumner's second novel is like a beautiful river on a summer day: it shines, gathers the light of the sun, reflects the sky and the trees arching over, but the heart of the thing--what soothes and moves, what takes hold and releases--lies deep below the surface. Swimming through its pages, which contain passages of great lyric beauty--whole paragraphs read like poems--brings an immediate pleasure, but it's not until one emerges that he knows he has been changed by his being immersed--changed and, in a significant way, healed.

The book's power to effect such a healing springs from its lovable main character, Ignacia Romero, a curandera, or medicine woman, who desires to heal not only those she loves and cares for--her grandson, Mister, for instance, whose parents have abandoned him--but also those she must tolerate. Her compassion extends even to Ramona Mondragon, the hapless and sometimes abusive mother of Yolanda and Tomas, Mister's best friend and blood brother; although continually disappointed by Ramona's inability to love herself and her children, Ignacia mixes up a paste that gets rid of the corns on Ramona's feet.

When a stray dog of a man named Layton Scoggins, who goes by the name Chief because, as he says, "that's what God calls me," shows up on her doorstep, Ignacia doesn't shoo him away but allows him to become useful again (he fixes her front door and installs an irrigation system in her garden). Eventually, Ignacia takes Chief as her man. Having been restored, albeit temporarily, to wholeness, Chief himself acts as an agent of healing; he builds a sweat lodge and, in one of the book's funniest and most powerful scenes, teaches everyone how to pray, saying, "Don't pray for yourself; it don't work."

While she lives, Ignacia is the strand that holds together the tattered blanket that is the barrio of Taos, New Mexico, where the majority of the novel unfolds. She is Abuela, grandmother, to the entire community. Upon her death, life gets messier, murkier, very quickly. Mister commits a crime that will alter him forever; he flees the barrio, and it's all he can do to maintain a loose grip on reality. Spiraling in the hole created by Abuela's death, missing her love, he seeks the love of Rocky, the gorgeous gringa he has wanted, ached for, imagined himself with since the tenth grade. Whether he survives depends almost entirely on whether Rocky forgives and accepts him despite his unthinkable crime, which affects her as markedly as it does him.

One of the strengths of The Ghost of Milagro Creek--and there are many--is that it acknowledges the brokenness of the world and the need we have, all of us, for healing. Sumner offers some ideas as to how we might proceed--she suggests we must come close to the earth, or closer at least, and closer to each other--but, in the end, she leaves the blanks unfilled. She knows there are no easy answers. Her characters are as fractured as they were at the start, which is to say, they are real, real and very much like ourselves.