Visible Signs

by Heather Tosteson

Visible Signs, set in Antigua, Guatemala, tells the story of Mikela, a fierce ten-year old indigenous girl determined to save her pregnant severely traumatized twelve-year old sister, Natividad, and the child she carries. Mikela draws together an unlikely assortment of American women to help her. What will happen to Mikela, Natividad and the baby becomes the central question of the novel. Their situation resonates with the private conflicts of each of the women drawn into this circle of care: Lourdes, an artist, who has taken a traveling fellowship to distance herself from her new marriage and a step-daughter angrily mourning the death of her own mother; Ginny, a priest, who needs to find a new God to worship, one that can celebrate her sexuality rather than deny it; Rosemary, who must face the reality of death with the illness of her friend Ginger; and Wilma, Rosemary's Guatemalan housekeeper, who has lost her own son in the recent civil war and is a reluctant host to many restless spirits of that conflict. The story unfolds in a God-raddled, spirit-ridden country with a bloody history, where religious traditions old and new, passionate spirits living and dead, and profound personal and cultural wounds combine and recombine to create a solution to their dilemma that is compelling, difficult, and mysteriously hopeful.

548 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2007

About the author

HEATHER TOSTESON, a fiction writer, poet and visual artist, is the author most recently of the poetry collection, Source Notes: Seventh Decade. She is also the author of the novels The Philosophical Transactions of Maria van Leeuwenhoek, Antoni's Dochter (1668-1696), which explores questions of sexual generation. She is also the author of the novel Visible Signs, and two collections of short stories, Germs of Truth and Hearts as Big as Fists & Other Stories. Her other two books of poetry are The Sanctity of the Moment: Poems from Four Decades, and Breathing in Portuguese, Living in English.

She is also the author and co-author of two non-fiction Wising Up Listening projects, most recently Sharing the Burden of Repair: Reentry After Mass Incarceration which looks at reentry from multiple perspectives. God Speaks My Language, Can You? explores spiritual journeys across many faith traditions.

She has co-edited and illustrated seventeen Wising Up anthologies, including most recently Flip Sides, Goodness, and Re-Creating Our Common Chord.

She has received a Nation/Discovery prize for her poetry and fellowships for poetry, fiction, and photography from MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA and Hambidge. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (UNC-Greensboro) and Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing (Ohio University). She has worked extensively in the public health and the health sciences as a writer, editor, and researcher. She is the founder, with Charles Brockett, of Wising Up Press and the Wising Up Press Writers Collective.

Reviews

[Sally Kitter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted very badly to like this book. And it started out that way, but somewhere along the way reading it began to feel more like a chore than a pleasure. I hate to say this because I can't even begin to imagine what it takes to write a book. Perhaps an editor could brisk up the flow a little bit? I am setting this aside to read again at another point.

I received a free copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway.