The Moment of Truth

Set in post–World War II Texas and Mexico, this second novel by McNicholl (A Son Called Gabriel) is inspired by the life of Patricia McCormick, the first professional female bullfighter in North America. Kathleen Boyd is a just a girl with a drawl from Texas, studying graphic art in a town a tram ride away from the bullring in Los Pinos, Mexico. She has dreamed of becoming a bullfighter since childhood. One morning, after she crosses the border and jumps into a bullring down in Garza to prove her talent, she decides to become the apprentice of the older matador Fermin Guzman, in the process leaving her fiancé and disapproving mother in the States. Rising through the ranks, but suffering the slings and arrows of being a woman in what was still very much a man’s world, Kathleen slowly comes into her own in Mexico, both as a bullfighter and as a woman. Nicknamed La Diosa Tejana, the Texas Goddess, by her fans, she falls in love with the doomed young matador El Cabrito, who teaches her to question the demands of her older mentor. The best parts of this book are the pages in which we are in the bullring. McNicholl vividly brings to life the bulls and the brute physicality of the art of bullfighting. It is less successful, based on the ultimate choices Kathleen makes, as a boundary-pushing treatise on the liberation of women in the 1950s.[em] (June) [/em]