Brooding with Storm Clouds: Return to Oaxaca (Hardback or Cased Book)

“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 captivating 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 program that lured me from the New York suburbs to Oaxaca for three high school summers and led to my studies of anthropology, first at Bennington College, then at the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally the New School for Social Research for a master’s degree. But living in New York, I longed for a more rural, simpler, hands-on life, galvanized, in part, by the village visits of my Oaxacan experience.

I soon found my place—a century-old, wood-heated summer inn on a hill overlooking Maine’s Penobscot River as it opens to the bay. With the novelist and poet Bill Carpenter, we’ve kept this old house warm, turned food waste into compost, sailed among dozens of Maine islands, and sent a lovely child out into the world. Throughout, I worked as a journalist for national and international periodicals, including cover stories in Smithsonian and Natural History magazines, served as a correspondent for the Boston Globe and other regional newspapers, published two Maine travel books and the oral history compilation We Never Knew Any Different: Stockton Springs Stories of the Past Century, and founded COA, the magazine of College of the Atlantic.

Eventually, Maine’s quiet and distance, 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.