Women So Divine

Women So Divine is a novel based on family memories. The first chapter, "La Nina," won first place in a contest organized by the newspaper El Norte in Monterrey, Mexico, which published it as a public interest story. In that initial episode, there is a meeting of seven women from two generations of the family. In that meeting, several family secrets are uncovered during a consultation session with a Ouija board. The curiosity to unravel these mysteries will be the common thread that leads the author to inquire into the past. To follow that thread, she delves into the lives of each of these women starting from episodes in their childhood all the way up to their maturity or death: her mother, her aunts, her cousins, and not least of all, herself. This book is the story of how the women of a Nuevo Leon family are united by loss and longing for restitution and how they use magic, superstition, and religion in unusual ways to somehow triumph and to adapt to a turbulent and sometimes dangerous world. Far from completely solving the unknowns, the biographical sketches and the stories of each subsequent chapter reveal the way in which certain events marked the character and destiny of each protagonist in unusual ways and how the lives and destinies of the seven women were intertwined. The novel has as a backdrop some episodes of the political history of Nuevo Leon and Mexico in the late 1930s, and it recreates the joys and miseries of the daily lives of these seven women of the Mexican middle class.

-- Alicia Garza-Martinez