Pescadero: a Novel

AMONG THE BEST INDIE LITERARY FICTION of 2024 — Kirkus Reviews “A quietly moving novel … raw and impactful.” — The BookLife Prize “A powerful story of dislocation.” — Publishers Weekly “Impressively original, exceptionally compelling, thoroughly engaging…” — Midwest Book Review “Special moments of humanness that feel very tender …” — Writer’s Digest What compels someone to attempt to cross a brutal and unforgiving desert in search of a better life? In this deeply moving, short novel, a Midwest girl bears witness to–and then becomes entangled in–the struggles of two undocumented brothers caught on opposite sides of the US/Mexico border. Fourteen-year-old Hilde, raised on a family farm in Wisconsin, is dragged to the northern California coastal town of Pescadero by a mother fleeing a bad marriage. But Pescadero is worlds away from the conservative Midwest, and Hilde finds herself adrift in a community where all the attitudes she absorbed growing up seem oddly off-key. When her mother hires an undocumented farmworker to tend the goat farm the family is trying to revive, Hilde strikes up an unlikely friendship with him and learns of his plan to bring his brother across the Border. But the brother’s journey turns calamitous, and Hilde soon becomes engulfed in its harrowing aftermath.