Customer Reviews

Wild Steps of Heaven

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In times of hardship heroes are needed and none moreso than in Mexico as revolution rages. The Villasenor family patriarch, an exiled red-haired Spaniard, has married an Indian woman. The first ten years of the marriage are a time of great love and passion, and the children born first are fair and favor Don Juan Villasenor. Later children are dark like their mother. One of the dark ones, Jose, from age 12 must live in the barn because he defied his father and gentled a stallion to rescue his baby brother holding onto the leg rather than shoot the horse. In his exile and solitude a hero begins his training with Grandfather Don Pio Castro who knows Jose understands the power of love and gentleness. This will be the son who defends la familia during the revolution from the soldiers who time and again attach the village. The colonel commanding the troops more particularly desires Jose's true love Mariposa and destroys her. Ultimately, the younger brother Juan (author Villasenor's father) begins to show heroic tendencies himself and will be the one to defend his mother and the remaining family against the colonel. Villasenor moves the tale along with a powerful, songlike cadence. Notable characters are the giant cousins, Basilio and Agustin, who strip naked and race the lightning and then Halley's comet on January 17, 1910, a night of magic and love, the day before el colonel begins shooting up the home village, el paraiso de Los Altos de Jalisco. Each chapter begins with epigrams featuring "Great Father Sun" that provide a sense of power from above, as in "the heavens smile . . . as all around him the gods and serpents did battle." When the final epigram tells us "and out of these children of the earth and of the stars would now come a glorious new gente in all their wonder and fire," we realize that while we have been traveling through an exciting story with more twists and turns than fiction, we also have been participating in something approximating a creation myth. Highly recommended is Villasenor's first tale of the family Villasenor, Rain of Gold.

Read this book before you read "Rain of Gold". "Wild Steps of Heaven" is a short read and actually the paternal part of the family story. I wish Villasenor had included the info in Wild Steps of Heaven" in "Rain of Gold". Both books are a wonderful patchwork of history,and genuine family integrity. Excellent summer read!

I first read "Wild Steps of Heaven" while I was in college. I have never been one who was able to finish a full book, but I couldn't get enough of this one. And once I was through with it I had to go out and find more books by Victor Villaseñor. He makes everything seem magical but at the same time believeable. It is like the ultimate adult fairy tale. Each character has so much life. The story is one that you just want to follow, you want it to keep going. Even the sad and painful stories shine with beauty as Villaseñor tells them. This is my absolute favorite book and I highly recommend it. You won't understand until you read it.

After reading Rain of Gold, an exceptional story, I couldn't wait to read this one. Wild Steps of Heaven tells more of Victor Villasenor's ancestral history, this time focusing on his grandfather's life as a young boy in Mexico. The book is very fast-paced and full of stories that are shocking in their violent imagery, yet show the importance of faith in God, love, and la familia.

Wild Steps to Heaven was a real disappointment. I read Rain of Gold and Thirteen Senses and enjoyed the stories about the family and their hardships in making a life for themselves in a different society. The characters were well drawn. I couldn't help fall in love with every single one of them.
Wild Steps to Heaven goes back to the time when little Lupe wasn't born yet. Much was a rehash what already had been told in the other two books. But what really disappointed me was the poor characterization of the Villasenor children. It was very superficial. The dialogue was not persistent with the way of life in this poor mountainous area. I didn't even feel the desire to finish the book.

Powerful. I laughed and cried.
Victor is not only a great author but a wonderful, down to earth individual.
I had the pleasure of meeting and having dinner with him a few days after reading this book; he mentioned that this was the most emotional, and the hardest book for him to write.

I have not had time to read this book yet, but I am looking forward to Christmas break so I have some leisure reading time! Loved Rain of Gold.

Sitting here in Jalisco, Mexico, having just finished reading "Wild Steps of Heaven", I feel more connected to the earth of this majestic country, to her history and to the power of the feminine that lies deep in her belly. Its like I was given a secret passage though which I may now view this culture. I am taken back by how eloquently the author expresses his profound wisdom of the grand play between the femine and the masculine, the undercurrents of the "Indios" world view within the macho western cultural expression and just how woman and the femine works its magic to hold a balance in our hard, cruel male dominated reality.

I now know and understand why the Virgin Mary reins supreme in the Catholic Churches of this country where the devine Virgin Mother Mary is positioned above all the altars, even above Christ.

I thrilled with the charactor of Dona Margarita and her works of divine magic that are wrapped up and hidden under her Catholicism, given to her though the ancient tribal Idios lineage of teachings from woman to woman. I pondered the juxoposition of her life and the life of all women who must live in a male dominated society and still endure, and still must keep bleeding and birthing, and still hold hope, and love and bear children and still yet, hold onto the sacredness of our tierre madre, the primal source and connection of humanity to this planet. All this done in the face of senseless violence, dark souls, and the lies that our reality demands we to pay homage to in an unswerving allegiance to war, hatred, and fear born out of our sacred broken hearts.

Villasenor, through revealing the stories told to him from his Mexican ancestors, tells us that it is out of the divine feminine and woman's endeavor to hold the teachings and to give them when and where she can that the whole world survives, the whole world endures, the whole world holds together and goes on, not because of hate and violence and wars but because of our stuggle and our ability to keep loving and holding onto faith though the feminine aspects of our being. The story is compelling and well told to the very last page.

I suspect that the author Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, if he could read it, would relish this work.

If you have a fear of death, if you have a hatred in your heart, if you need to know the purpose of this dance of life with all its pains and sorrows, and insanities, you will want to read this book. You need to read this book.

This is a very good book. A must read. Might even be better that Rain Of Gold

This is a wonderful book. This book is about a family living during the Mexican Revolution.His writing just takes into this magical world and even though you know that he has made a little piece of history into this great big piece of fiction, he does it so as a matter-of -fact that you just can't believe that it's not true.