Customer Reviews

Mariposa

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This is a delicious, evocative read. Candis Coffee captures and records those special moments of spiritual opening and aliveness that are the most illusive and most precious.

This is a wildly passionate tale that weaves through time and into and out of the lives of some very interesting characters. It makes the ordinary seem exotic, and through the main character, Annarose, touches on emotions that we all share. It also has one of the finest opening lines that I've ever read.

There is much to savor in this emotionally touching novel. Annarose, a brilliant observer of human nature, begins a physical and spiritual journey when she leaves her childhood home on the banks of the Concho, in West Texas, to immerse herself in the culture of ancient Mexico. Los Angeles is intermediate in the sequence of events. Throughout the novel you are taken in by the writer's voice. You can almost feel the white caliche crush under your feet as you carefully remove a prickly pear from a cactus. Annarose is complex and at the same time accommodating. The appeal of Annarose is her strength and her devotion to her family. Throughtout her journey, she never lost touch with the young girl who enjoyed sharing a Sunday afternoon with her family.

Mariposa, by Odessa, Texas, author Candiss C. Coffee, is a romantic work, and it is about romance, but it is not what the book trade nowadays calls a "romance."

Mariposa is, rather, a "portrait of the artist as a young woman"; and it is not unworthy of the implied comparison with James Joyce's early masterwork.

The focus in Mariposa is on the "Mariposa" (butterfly) herself, a Texas young woman named Annarose, who, in her teens in San Angelo in the 1920s, was exiled by her family to Los Angeles, and there in her 20s turned herself into an effective writer.

Following a fugitive but recurring sense of an inner spiritual guide known in her childhood but more lately "absconded,"-a "Presence" who could and did guide her-Annarose took herself to Mexico, to friendship with artist Diego Rivera and his sometime lover Frida Kahlo, also a considerable artist, and to an affair with still another artist named Crisanto.

The sense of "being there" is strong, and but the story is not autobiographical; Coffee would have to be more than 100 or so to have known the 1930s artists Rivera and Kahlo. Real persons and significant social and intellectual history, are interwoven with fictional people to make Mariposa a fascinating tapestry of cultural contrasts.

In the background is the continuing confrontation of relatively raw Anglo North America and relatively glamorous "old Mexico."

Mariposa opens in 1936 in San Angelo. Annarose has returned pregnant with Crisanto's child to her childhood home. We are not to find out until the end of Mariposa why they have not married. The bristly encounters of Annarose and her mother and grandmother lead to a flashback to 1923 and a vivid recreation of life on a small ranch near San Angelo, Texas: childhood adventures and friendships, swimming in the Concho River with water moccasins swimming nearby, the early tingling of erotic interest, especially for a Mexican boy named Ismael, and Annarose's sense of connecting with her mysterious Presence.

Mariposa's characters, north and south of border, will linger in your mind long after you have finished reading the book. This is a landmark story of life in the American Southwest.