Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut novel is set in 1930s Denver, Colorado, a teeming city built on the exploits of white colonial settlers and the erasure of Indigenous American lands, histories and societies. Its heroine is Luz Lopez, who must struggle to survive despite a traumatic past, a dangerous present and an unknown future.
Fajardo-Anstine describes Denver with a pleasing solidity, its shops, bars and carnivals and small bands of enemies and allies carrying a detailed everyday heft. She offers a fascinatingly rich setting that depicts American western self-mythologisation in the making, when the victors of history are secure enough that the murals in the local courthouse “depicted covered wagons, miners panning for gold, an abundance of white men coming to the land”.
