Curva Peligrosa

Description

When Curva Peligrosa arrives in Weed, Alberta, after a twenty-year trek on the Old North Trail from southern Mexico, she stops its residents in their tracks. With a parrot on each shoulder, a glittering gold tooth, and a wicked trigger finger, she is unlike anything they have ever seen before. Curva is ready to settle down, but are the inhabitants

A Canadian by birth, a high school dropout, and a mother at 17, in her early years, Lily Iona Mackenzie supported herself as a stock girl in the Hudson's Bay Company, as a long distance operator for the former Alberta Government Telephones, and as a secretary (Bechtel Corp sponsored her segue into the States). She also was a cocktail waitress at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, briefly broke into the male-dominated world of the docks as a longshoreman (she was the first woman to work on the SF docks and almost got her legs broken), founded and managed a homeless shelter in Marin County, and eventually earned two Master's degrees (one in Creative writing and one in the Humanities). She has published reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 150 American and Canadian venues. Her novel Fling! was published in July 2015 by Pen-L Publishing. Her upcoming novel, Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018. Her poetry collection All This was published in 2011. She also has taught writing at the University of San Francisco for 30 years and was vice-president of USF's part-time faculty union. When she's not writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband.

"Curva Peligrosa takes you on an entertaining, raucous, even bawdy ride." --Nina Schuyler, award-winning author of The Painting and The Translator "Curva Peligrosa is a wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths; it's a book which attempts to say serious and important things about language, story-telling, mortality, indigenous cultures, love, and sex." --Steven Bauer, author of The Strange and Wonderful Tale of Robert McDoodle and A Cat of a Different Color "Readers will find themselves spellbound by this novel's enchanted events. From the opening page when a tornado picks up a purple outhouse and deposits it intact in the middle of the Canadian prairie town of Weed with seductive Curva Peligrosa still inside, magical events occur. A visitor all the way from Mexico, Curva, six feet tall, lusty, mysterious, and irresistibly attractive, enthralls the townspeople. After her arrival, miraculous events envelop her and the town. Curva's dead twin brother appears. Ancient bones speak and come to life. A geyser bursts spontaneously from the earth, gushing water even in winter. In prose lush and poetic, Lily Iona MacKenzie's novel explores the inscrutable connection between life and art, fiction and fact. I found myself captivated from first page to last." --Hugh Cook, author of The Homecoming Man and Heron River