The Flower in the Skull

Deep in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico in the 1870s, a village of Opata Indians is attacked by soldiers. Along with the rest of her tribe, Concha is driven from her homeland and eventually finds her way to Tucson, where she finds a job cleaning houses and caring for children. When her own daughter, Rosa, is born, the legacy of Concha's dislocation continues, as Rosa is raised far from her native culture and struggles to find her place in a strange world. As she did in her acclaimed, award-winning novel, Spirits of the Ordinary, Kathleen Alcalá takes on the complexities of cultural heritage, identity, and assimilation, and explores the mysterious nature of place, spiritualism, and faith in the lives of these extraordinary ordinary people.