This tale of a repressive priest and his small Mexican village during the eighteen months preceding the Revolution of 1910 is a great novel, one that exposes the struggle between human desire and paralyzing fear--fear of humanity, fear of nature, fear of the wrath of God. Agustin Yanez probes the actions of people caught in life's currents, enthralling his readers with mounting dramatic tension as he shows that no power can forge saints from the human masses, that any attempt to do so, in fact, often has exactly the opposite result.

Yanez brings to his work a deep understanding of...