3 2 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e f a l l 2 0 0 8 Rise, Do Not Be Afraid. By Aaron A. Abeyta. Denver, CO: Ghost Road Press, 2007. 172 pages, $15.95. Reviewed by Alex Hunt West Texas A&M University, Canyon It is a pleasure to read a novel that engages us in the narrative ligaments of a place, a novel that trusts us to work at meaning and rewards us with an emotionally and intellectually powerful experience. Rise, Do Not Be Afraid is a novel by Aaron Abeyta, the Colorado poet whose earlier books won the American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Rise, Do Not Be Afraid relates the death of a community, specifically, Santa Rita, a town located in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. It is a place with an agro-pastoral economy and its own regional Spanish dialect. The com munity and its demise are rooted in colonial history. The origin of Santa Rita is associated with the Spanish reconquest and the development of a mestizo culture. The place is also shaped by US colonization, particularly the expro priation of lands once understood to be communally held. These historical forces take the latter-day form of evil and sin—human weaknesses like pride and greed that fracture the community along historical fault lines. On a more human level, the novel traces the love between Ramon and Nonnatusia and the wrenching miscarriages that tear them apart. It tells the story of Aresando, the veteran who loves Malinche Santistevan-Matthews, and Malinche’s husband, Karl Varshant, whose business is the drug trade. We meet Samuel and Elle, who hear gossip from crickets, and Cassiano, the world’s worst fisherman. In all, we meet about twenty-five characters in more than thirty short, complexly interwoven chapters that relate some eighty years of the community’s history. If Abeyta’s novel is of the death of a community, it is nevertheless also about the persistence of a place and a people, enduring through memory and story. Some of Abeyta’s narrative strategies, particularly as they relate to sense of place, seem Faulknerian, including a nonlinear construction through a vari ety of points of view to describe a landscape, a history, and a community. While Abeyta provides a cast of characters at the outset, I still found myself reaching for a pencil to draw maps and genealogies as one does when reading Faulkner and— another apt comparison— Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. When it comes to his treatment of Chicano folk culture and community, however, the best comparison might be to Sabine Ulibarri’s fiction of northern New Mexico, what Juan Bruce-Novoa once dubbed “Magical Regionalism.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Abeyta’s San Luis Valley setting of southern Colo rado is very near Ulibarri’s Tierra Amarilla country. Abeyta’s writing is beautiful, at once simple, highly figurative, and unpre tentious. His words are easy to read and good to read aloud. At the same time, his language is rich with metaphor and allusion—in particular to the Gospel B o o k R e v ie w s 321 of Luke— strong with the feeling that, as in poetry, every word has weight and significance. Readers of western American literature ought to take serious note of Aaron Abeyta. Willa Cather as Cultural Icon. Vol. 7 of Cather Studies. Edited by Guy Reynolds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 354 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Ann Romines George Washington University, Washington, DC The 2003 International Willa Cather Seminar, which generated this collec tion of essays, was the last such seminar to be conceived and directed by the late Susan Rosowski, a moving force in Cather studies for two decades and the founding editor of Cather Studies. Rosowski’s chosen topic, Cather as cultural icon, once more demonstrates how astutely she evaluated the emerging cli mate of Cather scholarship. This rich collection of essays, ably edited by Guy Reynolds, starts from the premise that Cather is now undeniably a central figure in “the twentieth-century U.S. literary canon.” As...