ARROYO

A down-and-out blues singer settles in a small New Mexico town and is gathered into the community where she finds love and spiritual redemption.

As a young teenager, Willie Lee Woolston ran away from her mother and grandmother’s loving home. And she’s been running ever since, earning an irregular living as a blues singer. Now 33 and tired of life on the road, even of singing, she buys a rundown adobe house in the small town of Los Fuegos because she remembers hitching a ride there five years before and giving away her grandmother’s jackknife as thanks to the young stranger who picked her up. In Los Fuegos, she’s immediately accepted by her neighbors, although it takes somewhat longer for her to sort out their lives. The reader may have even less luck. Newcomer Wood employs an elliptical prose style of incomplete sentences with dropped verbs and dropped “the’s” in both Willie Lee’s first-person account and in the third-person narrative about the community. As a result, characters tend to run together, and readers will find themselves referring frequently to the family trees that are included. Figures who do stand out, both villains like a bully who beats his wife or a sleazy bar owner who runs a prostitution ring, and victims/heroes like the bully’s ever-suffering wife and the beautiful, charismatic Chevela Abeyta, with whom Willie Lee falls in love, read like caricatures. Wood’s shorthand approach carries over into her plotting, with unnecessary gaps coming between snatches of incomplete information. Wood may be aiming at an aura of mystery, but the story remains merely vague even at the climactic moment when the local mining company’s faulty equipment causes a disaster. The author’s feel for the land is apparent, though, her best writing occurring in descriptions of the landscape that evoke an eroticism she does not quite pull off elsewhere.

An attempt at sensual romance undone by self-conscious prose and manufactured emotions.