Hannah and Ariela

After forty-eight wonderful years of marriage, Hannah Durand’s husband passes away, leaving his seventy-three year old wife all alone on a large ranch in Texas. Ariela Morales lives in a different world south of the Rio Grande. She leads the life of a typical poor kid in Zaragoza—helping the family, cleaning the house, babysitting her siblings.

Each chapter of the story has its own narrator, mostly Hannah or Ariela, but also family members, border agents, and human traffickers. Because the backgrounds of all the characters, including the secondary characters, are developed in rich detail, the plot advances slowly; the reader has to be patient, the first action not occurring until half way through the novel when Hannah finds Ariela, unconscious in a drainage ditch beside the road. Thereafter, the tension rises.

Can an old but determined Hannah thwart the vicious ruthlessness of the cartel that virtually rules Ariela’s home town? The strength of Hannah and Ariela, though, lies less in their adventure than in the power of the words and the picture they paint of the stark contrast between the poverty and suffering south of the border and the affluence and security to the north.