This Fierce Blood
Three generations of women are profiled in three different time periods, and three different places in the United States. They all have one thing in common: they are members of the Sylte family. The settings go from 19th-century New England to early 20th-century Colorado, to present-day New England. The first woman, Wilhelmina, forms a strange and mysterious connection with a mountain lion, and feline presences affect the other two women as well. Josepa is a Hispanic healer targeted by a local priest for trying to help her people. Ecologist Magdalena is surrounded by science and the mysteries it both solves and leaves unsolved. Glimpses of their lives open the reader to vivid places and times, from the stoic farmers of the East to the Southwestern-infused society of Colorado.
The women’s stories are about more than the land or its creatures. They are about how passions for work and family demand to be fulfilled, and more, how our brief lives are filled with the terrible beauty of romantic love, and the comfort and pain of children and family both.
Márquez’s prose is both beautiful and addictive as it carries the reader away into past times and through the hopes, dreams, and tragedies of one family’s women.
