Recommended Read for World Book Day

Today is World Book Day.

World Book Day is a celebration! It’s a celebration of authors, illustrators, books and (most importantly) it’s a celebration of reading. In fact, it’s the biggest celebration of its kind, designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, and marked in over 100 countries all over the world.

We are going to celebrate World Book Day here at balloonteam.net by suggesting a real page-turner with a ballooning theme and set in the ballooning capital of the world –  Rio Grande Fall by Rudofo A Anaya

When a woman dies after falling from a hot-air balloon at Albuquerque’s world-famous balloon fiesta, private investigator Sonny Baca’s intuition tells him it’s murder. His intuition also tells him that the murder is the work of the Raven, the leader of a violent cult that murdered Sonny’s cousin, and a man Sonny thought he’d killed. The murder jeopardizes the millions of tourist dollars connected with the fiesta, but Sonny knows the Raven has more on his mind than simple mayhem.

Click on the cover to purchase on Amazon

This is a completely entertaining mystery novel, but Anaya actually offers two parallel lands of enchantment. One is temporal New Mexico; the other is Nuevo Mexicano, a land of santos, milagros, spirits, visions, and even brujas (witches). It’s a land of old ways, old values, and old wisdom. And it’s a land where small farms and multigenerational families are fast being wiped out by modernity.”

While thinking of a book to recommend I browsed through my history at Amazon and stumbled across a following review which I wrote back in 1999!

“Having attended the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta as a pilot several times since 1990, I wanted to read this book to see how Anaya had captured the spirit of the event. He does this perfectly. There are however a number of technical details which are inaccurate, but these seem unimportant as the pace of the adventure hot’s up.

Reading the book at home on a cold, wet evening, Anaya transports the reader to the Land of Enchantment as he captures the essence of the city in it’s best month. I could smell those chillis, the pinion and feel the cool breeze and warm sun.

As for a crime thriller – well Sonny is just a little to good to be true, and the spirit guides always seem to come up with the goods at the right moments which turns some of the cliff hanging moments into “and with one bound he was free” escapes.

The only other book I have read by Anaya was “Albuquerque” That was good, this was better.

I did not feel disadvantaged by not having read the prequel, Zia Summer. Anaya does a good job of filling in the blanks, and in fact until I realised Rio Grande Fall was a sequel, I thought it was an interesting literary device to talk about the characters in a way which takes for granted their life before the narrative begins – much in the same style as William Gibson.

Read it as a travelogue of one of the US’s more culturally interesting cities, and enjoy the highly improbable plot and be educated by the historical and spiritual sub-plots.

And if you are a balloonist who has never been to the fiesta, read it before you go!

Rio Grande Fall [Paperback]
Rudolfo A. Anaya
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press (15 Sep 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0826344674
ISBN-13: 978-0826344670