Voice your opinion on all things literary on our message board. The village of Agustini, where the feisty Delmira Ulloa is reared by her mother and grandmother in an all-female household, is a place where bewitching things happen to a colorful cast of characters. Birds fall from the sky. Grandmothers float above beds.
Housekeepers bloom with stigmata.
It is even more interesting to experience how Boullosa so quickly unravels such a spectacular twist in the story line, incorporating legend, life lessons and the kind of sharp observation and insight always evident in her fiction. They made more noise than the birds, jumping and scurrying up and down the town, as if the falling birds were some kind of fun party, a holiday of beaks and blood that excited them beyond limits of self-control. As she weaves her tall tales, Boullosa unearths, layer by layer, the wonderfully crafted character of Delmira, an imaginative girl fathered by a stranger and reared by women who take turns ignoring her or excessively fretting over her. The women also tell stories, which are gracefully interlaced as short, character-revealing flashbacks. Particularly poignant is the abuela's account of growing up in a farmstead periodically overtaken by banditos who bargained with her father about how much pillage and drunkenness would ensue.