Queen of America

After the bloody Tomchic rebellion of 1892, young Teresita Urrea, beloved healer and "Saint of Cabora," escapes with her father to Arizona. But besieged by pilgrims in desperate need of her healing powers and pursued by assassins sent by Mexican dictator Porfirio Daz, she has no choice but to flee the borderlands and embark on an extraordinary journey into the heart of turn-of-the-century America. Teresita's passage will take her to New York, San Francisco, and St. Louis, where she will encounter European royalty, Cuban poets, beauty queens, anxious immigrants, and grand tycoons-among them, a man who will force Teresita to finally ask herself the ultimate question: is a saint allowed to fall in love? By turns heartbreaking, uplifting, and riotously funny, Queen of America tells the story of a young woman coming to terms with her place in a new world, and reconfirms Luis Alberto Urrea's status as a writer of the first rank.