Migrant Souls

When iron-willed Josie Salazar's husband walks out on her and their two daughters, she flees California and returns to her Texas hometown just above the Mexican border. It seems her husband, Harold Newman, had good reason to dissolve their marriage, but this masterly novel's winding, nonlinear plot only gradually divulges the secrets of Josie's sprawling clan, introduced in Islas's well-received first novel, The Rain God. The second installment in a projected trilogy vigorously portrays three generations of Mexican-Americans fighting prejudice while struggling to achieve self-definition. Their adaptive responses to Anglo culture vary sharply: Josie's proud, atheistic father, Sancho, is easygoing; her pious aunt Jesus Maria sees sin everywhere; her favorite cousin, Miguel Chico, a closet homosexual, becomes a writer and is labeled an ``ethnic novelist''--a fate one hopes will not befall the author of this beautifully delineated, down-to-earth, affecting saga. (Feb.)