Hummingbird House

Central America was rife with revolutionary upheavals and repressive violence during the 1970s and 1980s. Popular demand for social justice collided with traditional agrarian, almost feudal, societies. The rapid expansion of commercial agriculture drove small peasants off the land and into urban areas where they did not have the skills to make a living, and lost their pride in indigenous traditions and their positions of worth in their local communities. Industrial development fostered the growth of the urban working class and middle class, creating professional and blue collar jobs, but the poor and uneducated remained disenfranchised, with extremely high infant mortality rates, and almost no healthcare. The usually conservative Catholic Church became an agent for justice, popular mobilization and change. People demanded democratic reforms in the authoritarian political system, long dominated by landed elites and protected by vicious dictators and their military. In Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the reformist wave was broken by more repression and the mass murder of local populations. Kate Banner, a trained midwife, travels to Chiapas, Mexico in 1981, to visit her best friend, Maggie. She meets a man, Mark Deaver, the son of a wealthy American woman who has settled there. Mark is an adventurer of sorts, who will eventually run guns for the Sandinistas. Kate believes they will return to the United States one day, or somewhere away from the violence in Central America, and make a life together. In the meantime, she works with some of the 100,000 Guatemalan refugees who fled over the border to Chiapas for asylum, to escape the violence in their homeland. She delivers babies, administers first aid, and assists doctors, whenever one happens to appear. While Kate had never thought of herself as a revolutionary, she was strongly impacted, as a young girl, by the Civil Rights Movement, the bombing of the Baptist Church in Birmingham, the murders of innocent students at Kent State University, the protests against the War in Vietnam, photographs of Vietnamese children screaming with napalm burning their backs. She remembers the nuns telling her to "remember that you have been called to live in freedom." "You shall love they neighbor as thyself." Although she never believed in armed struggle, like Mark - she did want to help the victims of the violence. Eight years after her arrival in Mexico, Kate is living in Sandinista held Nicaragua, working in a clinic for women and children. She and Maggie are members of a community of activists, dedicated to helping the people of war-torn Nicaragua. Unfortunately, her relationship with Mark has been on the wane for some time, which causes her a great deal of anguish. While she still loves him, he has never really met her needs, or even knows what they are. She has finally come to grips with the futility of their relationship, and acknowledges the pivotal moment she has arrived at in her life. It is time to

Patricia Henley's first novel reflects a bit of recent history that should not be forgotten. It is a deeply moving plea for justice, a cry to wake us from our middle-class stupor, a novel that talks to our souls. The book is beautifully written; images and characters will stay with me for a very long time. I usually dispose of novels when I have finished them, but this one will stay on my bookshelf beside CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THE COLOR PURPLE, and other masterpieces that focus on the travesties that occur when justice is denied.

This novel both demands and deserves a close read. The language the author uses is complex, evocative, and at times even poetic. We get to spend some time with Kate Banner, not longer than a year, but she lives her life in the past and future throughout, measuring her life in total. Most interesting are her relationships with the men in her life, with all the accompanying complexities. This is a great novel, well-worth the price. I thouroughly enjoyed Kate's journey.

Patricia Henley has woven a most spectacular story in this book. It was difficult at first to find a way into the story -- I was confused and lost for a bit, but I managed to find my way in and unearth the triangle of lives that she builds the story around. Kate Banner is a noble and flawed woman -- and beautiful all the more in dealing with her struggles personally as well as in the treacherous world she choooses to live in. Into her world come a myriad of people -- most notably a priest with questions about his path in life (without compromising his faith and vibrancy) and a young orphan girl, whose impact on Kate changes her entire perspective. This is a book delicately written with such lush images that found myself reading certain passages over and over again. Couple that with human insights so bald, raw, and true that they still haunt me, and there's a beginning of an understanding of just how powerful a book this is. I loved the book when I read it, and as time passed after finishing it, the story stayed with me. I kept remembering it -- kept revisiting it -- kept seeing it. The story itself is wonderful wonderful and complex on its own... it has beauty and horror, love and hate, sense and incredulity, passion and war... its a love story as well as a crusade for humanity -- a story of a cause and an individual fighting to stay on top of the world long enough to make a difference -- a fight for self knowledge and understanding... and underneath it all is a masterwork of language, which lifts this book out of a story and into an experience. Henley's writing is so ripe in language there are phrases you can almost taste when read -- there is so much power in her choice of words that it will haunt you only moments after you've read them. She's created a beautiful experience for a reader -- one overflowing in humanity and haunting in language -- stay with the initial confusion, the reward is an experience that will stay with one for a long, long time.

Hummingbird House is a novel of immense power, detailing the life of an American mid-wife in South America. The prose is gorgeous and haunting. Guatemala is present throughout--its beauty, its poverty, the struggles of its people. It's a story I won't soon forget.