Customer Reviews

The Circle Leads Home (Women's West Series)

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A wonderfully distressful novel! Mary takes you to many complex levels that are part of the experience of being human. This book will not only force you to look at the complex prejudice and discrimination issues in our culture, but will expose parts of your own heart you may not want to see. The characters become vivid and alive and you will miss them for days after the last page has been turned. Kudos! to Mary Anderson Parks. Please don't make us wait to long for your next book. Yes, please do write a sequel and let us know about Sky and Katherine.

Mary Parks has created a character who is believable and real. She makes choices by intuition to preserve her family and herself by returning to her home on the reservation. After making the choice to be there, she makes the best of her difficult relationship with her mother and the man she gets too involved with. This character stayed with me for days as I read her search for herself and her ability to make wrong choice yet not be devastated by these mistakes. I liked her courage and her inner solidity as she makes her way into a new life. The themes of interracial marriage and raising children in a sometimes hostile world are intriguing and touch us as the sturggles of many women in the 90s.

Mary Anderson Parks' flawless debut novel "The Circle Leads Home" (1998) was the third title in the University Press of Colorado's Women's West Series.

Parks' novel reads like a first person memoir. She drives the plot forward with burning intensity. I only put this book down when my schedule tore it out of my hands.

We meet 32-year old Katherine as a sensual femme fatale working out memories and finding her way as a pure blood Indian in an Anglo metropolitan culture.

Katherine thinks with her body; men flock to her as if drawn to a honey pot. Her primal urges do not dull a keen intelligence that devours the classics. Katherine insightfully searches for a meaning in her troubled life history, and scrambles towards an escape into the future, as she returns to her home reservation. Yet, it will take work and time before this childhood home becomes a place she belongs.

Parks loves her heroine and treats her with dignity. Despite Katherine's drinking, smoking, promiscuity, thorny relationship to her mother, and marginal parenting, Katherine wants to be good.

"The Circle Leads Home" lives up to its title. Layers of fear and denial gradually strip away during a packed summer. Katherine takes a stand for the good of her reservation and comes of age before it's too late.