about the book
One summer, I travel back to Mexico to visit my family. “Mateo, can you believe in the impossible?” my elderly Grandfather Teo asks. When he puts a necklace of gold coins in my palm, sparks jump, zooming up my arm like tiny fireworks, exploding in my chest. I just manage not to freak out. Then he tells me he is sending me on a journey of marvels, a movie of his life! He also tells me there is no ending. “That, Mateo, will be up to you.” This is what he shows me:
In the 1950s, besides the few who seek out the healer, no one comes to our remote dirt-poor Mexican mountain village. It is called the Hill of Dust, a cluster of adobe huts surrounding a sad old church. Then one day a colorfully painted caravan of four horse-drawn vardos plods up the hill. The gypsies don’t look like us Mixtec. The women wear colorful flowing dresses and the men have luxuriant mustaches and thick gold chains.
Ivan introduces himself, the Master of the Traveling Cinema. For the next three nights, the Romani tell fortunes and bring the magic of movies. I am only eleven and I sit at the very front, totally amazed. But what really catches my attention is the mesmerizing voice of the girl who sings along with the flickering images.
She is Esme, the Queen of Lightning. She is so full of life that she changes my life. I had been feeling lost and hopeless without my mother and sister. My sister is dead; my mother is alive…but lifeless. When her grandmother reads our fortunes and predicts Esma and I will be lifelong friends and will someday save each other when no one else can, the world suddenly brims with possibilities.
We work hard to make sure our destiny comes true but there are cultural differences, opposition, and even a death. But with the help of a rescued duck, a three-legged skunk, a blind goat, and others, we overcome the obstacles as our story spans generations. Unfortunately, Esme and I have to go our separate ways.
As Grandpa Teo’s story catches up to the present, I learn that he needs my help to fulfill his destiny. Bringing the two back together is a daunting task but I will do my best. After all, like lightning, Teo and Esme’s is a rare and magical friendship.
about the author
Laura Resau spent her first ten years in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. At eleven, the family moved to the suburbs where her new house was nestled in an old farm field and woods. She was an explorer, checking out the thicket, stream, rusty farm machinery, and the old abandoned barn. As a teen, she and her friends hung out at the Patapsco River and the dam. She liked to crawl through an opening to stand behind the gushing waterfall.
When Laura went to St. Mary’s College, she lived in the Poodle Doodle House. Once a pet grooming business, the old house contained nifty secret passages. When not studying, she swam with the glow-in-the-dark plankton, gathered sea glass on an isolated beach, and watched the wading herons in the marshes.
After earning a bachelor’s in anthropology and French, she became certified to teach English as a second language (ESL) and set off to Huajuapan, a small university town nestled in mountainous Oaxaca, Mexico. There she became fluent in Spanish and the indigenous languages and shared the peoples’ culture and stories, even participating in some of the healers’ ceremonies. She carried a notebook everywhere and wrote voraciously.
Years later, while working on a master’s in cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona, she used those journals to write her first novel, What the Moon Saw. That summer, Laura went back to Oaxaca to study native childbirth practices and the healers. After graduating, she moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, married husband Ian, worked with immigrant families, and taught ESL and cultural anthropology at the local college. The immigrant families inspired more books.
After Ian and Laura adopted a Guatemalan son, she turned to writing full time. She still travels a lot and always carries her journal with her. Ten years ago an Oaxaca healer, Maria, regaled Laura with the story of how the gypsies used to come to the village to show films and tell fortunes. The story simmered in Laura’s unconscious for over a decade before turning into a story of impossible friendship and became her novel The Lightning Queen!
Source:
Author website
Also by Laura Resau:
Star in the Forest. Delacorte. 2010.
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