DESERTS OF THE HEART

Well-bred Spanish sisters confront the rough-hewn culture and sexy cowboys of 18th-century Santa Fe in this period romance.

Following the deaths of their parents in a 1798 yellow fever epidemic, 21-year-old Sofia Alcantara y Pasqual and her 14-year-old sister, Valeria, travel from Veracruz to New Spain’s northern outpost of Santa Fe. They are to be governesses at a hacienda, but their main mission is to find husbands among the region’s single men. Despite their small dowries, their distinguished family background and general classiness as immigrants from old Spain guarantee them good prospects provided they maintain spotless reputations. Arriving at Rancho de las Palomas, they meet the kindly Don Emilio, who insists they teach the mestizo ranch hands’ kids as well as his own; his frosty wife, Doña Inmaculada, a racist religious fanatic who wants the ranch hands kept uneducated; and his cruel eldest son, Alfonso, who bloodies his horse with his spurs whenever he rides to Santa Fe. Then there’s the lanky ranch manager, Beto, Don Emilio’s bastard son by a Native American mistress, whose arrogant manliness infuriates and attracts Sofia. Sofia is appalled when Valeria falls in love with the loathsome Alfonso, but her own behavior is even more reckless. Sofia casually gives up her virginity when she and Beto shelter in a cave during a thunderstorm. After many more outdoor assignations, she gets pregnant. Yet despite Beto’s uncanny skill as a lover and persistent marriage proposals, she puts him off because he considers romantic passion to be destructive nonsense and views their union as a smart, stock-breeding move. The plot thickens as Doña Inmaculada levels witchcraft charges at a Native healer; Alfonso’s rivalry with Beto turns violent; and Sofia mulls unwed motherhood in a nunnery.

Sheehy’s yarn paints a well-observed, almost ethnographic portrait of life in what would become New Mexico, a place where gradations of race and class are marked but there is also much multicultural blending between Spanish and Native societies. (The local Pueblo Indians don’t see much difference between the Virgin Mary and their own Corn Goddess.) The novel also charts a transition in mores from religious obscurantism toward Enlightenment rationality and from citified polish and hauteur toward frontier earthiness and egalitarianism. And the collision between a refined daughter of privilege and a rustic mestizo who likes to talk frankly about sex suggests an antique, Spanish-flavored Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Some aspects of this feel contradictory and even anachronistic. Despite the insistent talk of dire reputational consequences for sexual transgressions, such indiscretions provoke ribaldry rather than condemnation. Nonprocreative acts that would have been thought sinful and repulsive back then are embraced by the blithely sex-positive characters. Sheehy’s prose is skillful and evocative in descriptive passages but doesn’t convey passion well. While the physical attraction between Sofia and Beto is ostensibly volcanic and multiorgasmic in the many lavish sex scenes, their relationship feels stilted, with Beto’s stolid dialogue—“ ‘Oh,’ he said, as if an afterthought, ‘your broad hips and your full breasts are not just well-suited for childbearing. They are beautiful to my eyes—and to my hands and to my other parts’ ”—usually killing the mood. Readers may be left wondering what the couple, aside from various body parts, really see in each other.

A richly textured portrait of old Santa Fe arranged around a flawed love story.