Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Likely Stories - Woman of Light: A Novel by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Women of Light is a story with many ins and outs.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine has garnered scads of awards from dozens of articles including the 2021 recipient of from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and has lived across the country from Colorado to Florida.

This novel, Women of Light, is a dazzling epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an indigenous Chicano family. The story begins with Luz Lopez as a tea leaf reader and laundress, left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob.

The story begins in nineteen-thirties Denver. “Luz Lopez sat with her auntie Maria Josie near the banks where the creek and the river met, the city’s center illuminated in green and blue lights, a Ferris wheel churning above them. The crowds of Denver’s chile harvest festival walked the bottomlands with their faces hidden behind masks of turkey legs and bundles of buttered corn. The dusk air smelled of horse manure and gear grease and the sweet sting of green chilies roasting in metal drums. Through the smog of sawdust and food smoke, Luz was brightened by the flame of her kerosene burner, black hair curled around her noteworthy face, dark eyes staring into a porcelain cup. She wore a brown satin dressed dulled by many washes—but still she shined” (3).

‘The Trouble with Men’--“They parked on Curtis Street and scrambled out of Alfonso’s busted-up Chevy in a line of dress clothes, a click-clack of Luz’s and Lizette’s pumps. David’s party was at the end of a strip of dance halls with names like Royal, Empress, Colonial, and Strand. Dime girls danced in rosy windows while corner Romas sold hash and breathed fire from sticks. The night smelled of the far-0ff meatpacking plant’s manure and metal, and soon mixed with the scent of marijuana and perfumed skin. Diego and Alfonso ducked into an alleyway, their black hair glinting, their secondhand wing-tipped shoes polished bright. They sparked a joint and told Lizette and Luz to keep watch. // (30). ‘You better not get too owled,’ said Lizette. ‘David won’t like that.’ ‘Let him get mad.’ (30).

Women of Light is deserving of all 5 stars!

Likely Stories is a production of KWBU.  I’m Jim McKeown.  Join me again next time for Likely Stories, and happy reading!