In her vividly drawn, bitingly satiric first novel, the Whiting Award-winning young author immerses readers in the wrenching poignancies and comic grotesqueries of one fractious, flamboyant family in contemporary Georgia.

The story of Ignacia Vigil Romero, a full Jacarilla Apache, and the two boys, Mister and Tomas, she raised to adulthood unfolds in a barrio of Taos, New Mexico--a mixed community of Native Americans, Hispanics, and whites. Now deceased, Ignacia, a curandera--a medicine woman, though some say a witch--begins this tale of star-crossed lovers.

Mister and Tomas, best friends until their late teens, both fall for Rocky, a gringa of some mystery, a girl Tomas takes for himself. But in a moment of despair, a pledge between the young men leads to murder. When Ignacia falls silent,...