Brooding with Storm Clouds: Return to Oaxaca

“What you feel at sixteen as you wander through life trying to feel again…”

After twenty-six years, award-winning photographer Lena Mendel returns to Oaxaca, Mexico, where at age sixteen she spent a transformational school year with six other girls. Now she’s back with two classmates from that magical time, along with Lena’s adolescent son Gabriel who is bent on creating some independence from his mother’s single parenting.

As the travelers savor Oaxaca’s giant puppets, daring fireworks, and romantic serenades, an unexpected encounter unearths a long-buried secret that upends Lena’s tiny family, challenges her autonomy, and changes the lives of mother and son forever, while also exposing the shadowy politics of this dazzling city…then Gabe wants to remain in Oaxaca.

Within the crucible of Oaxaca’s massive 2006 teachers’ strike and the brutal repression of those organizing for their rights, Lena and Gabe realize a new relation to themselves, each other, and to this troubled land.

What Readers Think

This beautiful novel reads like a love letter to Oaxaca… Framed by dramatic sociopolitical upheaval, this capti-vating story of family and friendship is brimming with heartache, secrets, and most of all, love.

—Laura Resau, author of thirteen young-adult and adult novels, includling What the Moon Saw, set in Oaxaca

Lucious. Brilliant. A perfect weaving of motherhood, pre-colonial history, and the politics of education in Mexico.

—Etta Kralovec, Ed.D, Founding Director of the Borderlands Education Center

About the Author

Brooding with Storm Clouds was inspired by an extraordinary summer high school program that lured me from New York to Oaxaca, Mexico and led to my study of anthropology at Bennington College and the University of California, Los Angeles, and a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research. Applying these studies to journalism, I wrote for national and international periodicals, including cover stories in Smithsonian and Natural History magazines.

Longing for a simpler, more hands-on life, I moved to Maine where I discovered my place: a century-old, wood-heated home on a hill overlooking the Penobscot River as it opens to the bay and, with novelist and poet Bill Carpenter, sent a lovely child out into the world.

Throughout, I served as a correspondent for the Boston Globe and other regional newspapers, won awards for both journalism and editing, launched COA, the magazine of the environmental College of the Atlantic, and published We Never Knew Any Different: Stockton Springs Stories of the Past Century.

Eventually, the quiet of rural Maine and the daily interplay of sun and cloud on water, offered me the perspective to visualize the fullness of the friendships and openings gathered during my time in Oaxaca and mold it into the fictional story that is Brooding with Storm Clouds.