Ariel's Crossing
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Ariel Rankin seeks to locate and save her unknown father—a man deeply scarred by his secret and brutal role in the history of his country
In the sequel to Bradford Morrow’s heralded Trinity Fields,young New Yorker Ariel Rankin learns that her birth father is not the man who raised her but rather a soldier named Kip Calder who disappeared into the jungles of Laos during the Vietnam War. Hoping to preserve her otherwise happy life, she pushes the revelation out of her mind. But when Ariel finds herself confronting motherhood, she decides to pursue the parent she never knew—a dying man burdened by some of his country’s most terrible secrets, who has returned home to New Mexico in search of redemption. Her quest will take her from the holy village of Chimayo to the highly restricted, pitiless deserts of the White Sands Proving Grounds as she goes straight to the heart of the American experience. Evoking the rugged beauty of the New Mexican landscape, Ariel’s Crossing weaves social with magic realism while creating a moving portrait of that elusive thing we call home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Due to a production error, the following review was omitted from a previous issue.ARIEL'S CROSSINGBradford Morrow. Viking, (390p) Morrow uses a woman's search to find her father as a vehicle to explore the dual legacies of Los Alamos and Vietnam in his latest, a powerful, multilayered novel in which he revisits a character from Trinity Fields, Kip Calder, who becomes the holy grail of a quest by his daughter, Ariel Rankin. As the novel opens, Rankin is leading a comfortable life as an assistant editor for a Manhattan publisher, but things gets turned upside down in a hurry by a surprise pregnancy, along with the revelation that Brice McCarthy (who also appeared in Trinity Fields) is not her real father. Most of the novel involves Rankin's search for Calder, who survives a bout with illness and a down-and-out stretch when he is taken in by the Montoya family in the remote desert of New Mexico. Rankin's search is complicated by Calder's erratic wanderings, which culminate in an effort to help Delfino Montoya, who worked on the Manhattan Project, recover the ranch that was seized by the government during the military effort. The first half of the novel is near-brilliant, as Morrow sets up a tightly woven network of strong, intriguing characters while crafting evocative chapters about the tumultuous effect of political events on the lives of his protagonists. The novel fades down the stretch, mostly due to overcomplicated subplots, including one involving Rankin and her love interest, Marcos Montoya, while a final confrontation with the government on the ranch is drawn out and labored. These problems aside, this is yet another outstanding, thought-provoking novel from one of America's major literary voices as he continues to explore the issues that made Trinity Fields so compelling and memorable.
