Tag: White Sands

BOOK REVIEW: The Chalk Hill

Unless you’re reading speculative fiction, the only possible outcome for a book about Albert Jennings Fountain is his February 1896 disappearance, along with his eight-year-old son, in the desert of southern New Mexico.

Mary Armstrong’s latest novel, The Chalk Hill, is not speculative. It’s rooted deeply in the New Mexico politics, personalities, and events of New Mexico in the three years leading up to the Fountain disappearance and folds them masterfully into a readable story that kept me thoroughly engaged.

This novel picks up where Armstrong’s The Bisti Badlands left off. If you haven’t read that book, the author and I both suggest you do so before beginning The Chalk Hill,  which plunges immediately into the ongoing story with Fountain’s nephew Jesús as narrator.

Much of this book, which is the fifth in Armstrong’s The Two Valleys Saga, focuses on the newly married young lawyer’s relationship with both Fountain and Fountain’s nemesis, Oliver Lee. Jesús, caught in the middle, provides a way for Armstrong to explore both sides of the conflict between southern New Mexico’s Republicans and Democrats, as well as the “new” and “old” ranchers. The conflict which ultimately resulted in the Fountains’ disappearance.

I say “disappearance” because the bodies of father and son have still not been recovered 130 years later. The mystery of what happened to them and who was responsible continues to bedevil southern New Mexico politics and personal relationships, as descendants of Fountain, Lee, and their partisans defend the actions and words of the late nineteenth century.

If you want to understand why, The Chalk Hill may provide the answers you’re looking for. If you simply want to read a masterfully researched historical fiction set in New Mexico, it’ll provide that, as well.   I recommend it!

BOOK REVIEW: The White Sands, The Two Valleys Saga, Book 3

The third book in Mary Armstrong’s Two Valleys saga, The White Sands, takes a further dive into the history of southern New Mexico as it explores the events that led up to the famous feud between  Albert Fountain and Albert Fall. While Fall would go on to be implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal, Fountain would disappear into the White Sands in 1896  with his ten-year-old son Henry.

But I’m getting ahead of myself and Armstrong’s novel The White Sands. In this book, her narrator, Jesús Messi, gets to know the Lee family, the clan that was thought by many to be responsible for the Fountain disappearance. What he discovers is that there are two sides to every story, and more than one way to deal with a problem.

Armstrong uses Messi’s memory loss, suffered at the end of Book 2, to place him in the midst of the Tularosa Basin and the Lee network of family and friends. As part of that group, he comes to understand their perspective, which makes things awkward for him when he returns to Las Cruces. The teenage Jesús is caught between two worlds as he realizes that neither side is totally in the right—or the wrong.

His struggles are thoughtfully portrayed and provide a great way for Armstrong to explore the antagonism between the political parties at the time and the way those political divisions became deeply personal. In fact, the attitudes and events she recounts are eerily echoed in today’s news. They involve strong, opinionated personalities, convoluted legal questions, impatient and potentially coerced witnesses, and much more.

If you’re interested in southern New Mexico history in the late 1800s, the way our past is echoed by our present, or simply want an insightful coming-of-age story about an intelligent and perceptive young man, I highly recommend The White Sands.