Authors revisit Esperanza life

“Sunlight and Shadow” was the title of the 2004 award-winning novel that’s set in the small fictional town of Esperanza, N.M. New Mexico authors and lifelong friends Sue Boggio and Mare Pearl wrote that book, and now they’ve written a new novel, “A Growing Season,” which takes place in Esperanza seven years later.

In the first book, Abby and Roberto Silva had just moved to the town. Now Abby Silva is a single parent raising an adopted son. The Vigils are her farmer-neighbors.

“We wrote ‘A Growing Season’ because readers of ‘Sunlight and Shadow’ said they want more, and as writers you try to pay attention to what your readers want,” Boggio said.

	“The Growing Season” by Sue Boggio and Mare Pearl UNM Press, $18.95, 256 pp.

Back in 2004, she said, the state was beginning to experience a worsening of the drought, “and we began to wonder how that would affect our chile farmers in Esperanza.”

The authors also investigated the real-life battle of Rio Grande farmers against the effort to divert irrigation water to save the endangered silvery minnow.

CeCe and Miguel Vigil are chile farmers. Their economic survival depends on their chile crop, and the crop needs sufficient irrigation water. The Vigils’ friendship with Abby is strained when she begins a relationship with a biologist researching the silvery minnow.

The book explores other issues. Abby Silva’s adopted son Santiago is graduating from high school as a straight-A student. He becomes caught up in his late father’s criminal past just before heading to college. This raises the issue of the violence he saw as a boy and about his adoption by a white woman, Boggio said.

CeCe Vigil’s father survived the Nazi concentration camp Treblinka. “He was not able to be a good father to CeCe. She suffers from her father’s neglect, and her father disapproved of her marrying a non-Jew,” Pearl said. “So it’s a story of healing the past and the life we create for ourselves that separate ourselves from others ideologically, and the fractures within our own selves and within our relationships.”

Editor’s note: UNM Press has re-released “Sunlight and Shadow” as an ebook and a print-on-demand trade paperback.

Sue Boggio and Mare Pearl discuss, sign “The Growing Season at 3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 15, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW, and from 1-3 p.m. Nov. 25 at Treasure House Books & Gifts, 2012 South Plaza NW.