A shell for Angela

by Ofelia Dumas Lachtman

From the moment nine-year-old Angela Martin sees her father led away on a summer day by immigration officers, she spends her life denying her Mexican roots. As the novel opens, Angela Martin Raine, a woman with a newly born fear and a newly awakened regret prodding her, leaves a comfortable Los Angeles home and a distressed husband to return to a fishing village in Mexico, there to face the reality of her denial. The story of her journey is told in juxtaposition to the story of a crucial summer in her childhood, "the summer of the fruit picking," when her father was involved in an attempted fruit pickers' strike in the Central Valley. As a result of his activities, her father was unjustly deported and subsequently murdered in a twisted vendetta.