Consider This, Senora

Rating:
Summary: Back again to rural Mexico with Harriet Doerr
Review: This is not quite Stones for Ibarra, but perhaps that is only because Stones came first. We are back in rural Mexico, its people bemused and amused by the strangers among them, its roads of detours and dead ends, its dust, its sudden beauty. Five expatriates come to Amapolas, their lives interwoven over five or six years, loosely connected like the chapters of the novel, each of which could stand -- and some of which were published as -- a short story. Bud Loomis is the most surprising, Ursula Bowles, the widow who has come back to Mexico more than sixty years after her childhood, is the most perceptive. Then, one by one, changed, renewed or returned by these years, the foreigners leave Amapolas and their homes on the plain. They thought they would stay forever, instead they forever take Amapolas with them. I only wish Harriet Doerr had begun publishing long before her seventies, for these two novels are gems worth discovering.