Mothertongue

Winner of the 1994 Western States Book Award for fiction, Mother Tongue tells of the love between a young, naive Mexican-American girl named Maria and Jose Luis, a Salvadoran refugee. In touching, passionate, poetic prose, Martinez pulls the reader along on Maria's journey into womanhood and never lets go. Told through letters, journal entries, a grocery list and other bits of her life's incunabula, Maria reconstructs the story of her past to let her son know how he came to be. She says, ``Once a story is begun the whole thing must be told or it kills.'' But as she pieces her story together, Maria also begins to heal herself. Until she decides to tell her story her wounds are invisible, but with her memories she peels away her outer layers until she reaches her true psychic muscle, an unsuspected inner strength as potent as that which she so admired in and craved from her lover. Few authors could master both the journey of self-discovery and the tumultuous landscape of love, politics and culture in such a brief novel, but Martinez's gentle lyricism is what makes her a master storyteller and makes Mother Tongue an unforgettable story. (Oct.)