Jillian in the Borderlands - Paperback

by Beth Alvarado (Author)

Jillian Guzmán, who is nine years old at the beginning of the book, communicates through drawings rather than speech as she travels with her mother, Angie O'Malley, throughout the borderlands of Arizona and northwestern Mexico. Later she creates survival maps for border crossers and paints murals at the Casa de los Olvidados, a refuge in Sonora run by the traditional healer Juana of God. These darkly funny tales, focusing on Mexican-American, Euro-American, and Mexican characters, feature visionary experiences, ghosts, faith healers, a deer's head that speaks, a dog who channels spirits of the dead-and a young woman whose drawings begin to create realities instead of just reflecting them.

Author Biography

Beth Alvarado is a prose writer, teacher, and desert dweller. Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales is her fourth book. "Alvarado's use of many voices," one reviewer writes, "challenges the tendency to make stories of people and places linear and from a single perspective." In Alvarado's nonfiction, she has written extensively about her experiences as a Euro-American woman marrying into her late husband's Mexican American family when she was 19 years old. She spent most of her life in Tucson, Arizona, and now lives in the high desert of central Oregon. Her essay collection, Anxious Attachments, won a 2020 Oregon Book Award.