Brooding with Storm Clouds - Return to Oaxaca

“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 capti-vating 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, including 

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