Woman of the Old Roads

The women in Juan Rodriguez Perez's narrative are mothers, wise old women, neighbors, and subjects of love and desire. The other characters surround them: kids who become men, young men growing up in the drama of adulthood, and adults who give up on life while the women continue to maintain the world. These women are converted into main characters facing the two biggest problems that plagued the San Martín Region in Peru: armed subversion and drug trafficking. Set in a small town in the jungle, a Peruvian version of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, these are authentic stories that submerge the reader in nostalgia, developing sometimes bloodily and other times as if by destiny. There is no happy ending, only development within a period of history still hard to understand.