Crossing Over The Moon

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​Debut novel, Crossing Over the Moon, is the story of a rural family struggling to navigate the shifting landscape of secrets, borders, narcos, and the social upheaval of late 20th century Mexico. 

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Beginning on the agave-fringed slopes of a rumbling volcano in the Mexican highlands circa the early 1960s, Crossing Over The Moon follows the extraordinary life of María Esperanza Villa Jimenez, a precocious adolescent with incisive wit who earns scholarship to university, falls in with a bohemian literary circle in the capital, experiences the devastating Mexico City 1985 earthquake, and matures to become a leader of Mexico’s emerging Zapatista social-justice movement of the 1990s.

       Set into motion by the death of the family’s youngest son Carlito, this fast-paced, magical realism-laced narrative tracks the divergent lives of several other family members; illegitimate half-brother Prieto who disappears from home and becomes a ruthless narco lieutenant after causing Carlito’s death; younger brother Tachi who bears the secret of the incident; eldest brother Theo who emigrates to the U.S. to seek his fortunes and, after a harrowing border crossing and gruesome work in the stockyards of the midwest, enlists in the U.S. Army and serves on the front lines of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. The story also follows Grandma Griselda as she watches the family’s earthly events unfold from the swirling mists of the afterlife. 

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       As the story advances, the disparate subplots merge and drive the narrative to its dramatic conclusion when the principal characters return home for their mother’s funeral.