Publisher's Weekly Review
This standout ecological novel from Arizona author Sojourner (Going Through Ghosts) features picturesque prose, a vivid western setting, and sharply drawn characters. Fifty-five-year-old Nell Walker is fired from her lucrative job as an accounts executive at a pharmaceuticals marketing firm during the 2008 economic downturn. With only $600 to her name, she leaves L.A. on a Greyhound bus and broods over her estranged mother, Tara, who is a "petty dope dealer," and her broken office affair with David. After arriving in the arid, scorching town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., in the Mojave Desert, Nell finds lodging at La Paloma, a women's shelter, and employment as a bookkeeper at an auto repair shop run by Monkey Barnett, a "shade tree mechanic" and "Okie stoner." Monkey is married to Jackie, an RN at a retirement home and a part-time artist. Nell and Monkey banter in the workplace, where she discovers that he has apocalyptic visions, perhaps related to the impending environmental peril facing Twentynine Palms. After Nell befriends Mariah, a local Chemehuevi Native American, they visit her sacred tribal path, where she reveals that FreegreenGlobal, an international solar energy conglomerate, is trying to build a facility on their property. Nell decides to help Mariah in the defense of her people's land and rediscovers her own identity in the process. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A former executive at a global pharmaceutical corporation, Nell had a lot to lose, and she lost it all. Counting her last dollars, brokenhearted, and homeless, she rides Greyhound buses across California, trusting to fate, which delivers her to tiny Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert. The spare, mysterious landscape summons forth long-buried shards of memory, including glinting fragments of Nell's rootless childhood, hitchhiking and living rough. Steered to a homey underground shelter run by smart, renegade, and culinarily gifted women, Nell finds succor and reasons to live. She even finds a funky job with Monkey, a shade-tree mechanic and notorious pothead. Monkey is devoted to his artist wife, but he and Nell have a cosmic connection beyond their eerily aligned, irreverent, rock-and-roll-oriented sense of humor. Each is seized by galvanizing visions of planetary disruption involving endangered species, from bees to seahorses. These unnerving portents are borne out in violent confrontations with a multinational solar-power company commandeering Native American sacred sites. On a commercial scale, even alternative-energy sources are destructive. Ever-ascending Sojourner (Going through Ghosts, 2010) cooks up wrenching sorrow and hilarious banter, environmental and moral conundrums, magnetizing characters, and a place of transcendent beauty in this intoxicating, provocative, and gloriously told desert tale of wildness and community, unexpected bonds and deep legacies, trauma and healing.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Strong writing pulls readers into this novel by Sojourner (Going Through Ghosts) featuring Nell Walker, a 55-year-old corporate executive who leaves her high-flying L.A. life after getting fired and being dumped by her married lover. When she arrives at a struggling desert town near Twentynine Palms, she enters a women's shelter with nothing but her suitcase, her laptop, and a little bit of cash. The supportive women there help Nell find a computer job at the local car repair garage, warning her that the owner, called Monkey, is constantly stoned and has intense visions. Nell is instantly enlisted into a local fight against a solar development company whose activities are threatening the wildlife and damaging the Chemehuevi sacred sites. Nell suspects that Monkey's trances are warnings coinciding perfectly with predictions from scientists about the weakening of the earth's magnetic core, with the ancient Mayan prophecy about global transition, and with such inexplicable changes in the natural world as disappearing bees. A complicated reunion with her ailing mother, a love affair with Monkey, and the activism of the Native Americans take Nell to a place she realizes is her home. VERDICT Notable characters carry Sojourner's powerful story of our connection to the earth. A profoundly affecting novel.-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
