About the Books
Across the Narrows
“Poignant and engaging, with strong female characters.”
— Kirkus Reviews
In 1924, at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital, Ruby del Palacio delivers a blue baby weeks early. The baby girl dies for want of oxygen. Within a year, Ruby delivers another baby girl named Alice.
Gradually realizing that her sole role in the del Palacio household is to conceive, deliver, and nurse babies, trapped by societal expectations in a time of limited women’s rights and rampant injustices, Ruby summons the courage to sue for a legal separation from her Colombian husband, Juan. Her efforts are met with a counter lawsuit, resulting in Juan being granted custody of their six children. Months later, he flees the state with the children, leaving Ruby abandoned and bereft.
Decades later, Alice embarks on a journey to find her long-lost mother. It is only when a dear friend imparts a profound revelation to Alice, explaining that forgiveness necessitates relinquishing all hope for a different past, that Alice finds the strength to accept her history.
Across the Narrows unravels as a sweeping family saga, centered around a tragedy that shapes the del Palacio family’s destiny and leaves little room for forgiveness. With themes of love, loss, and resilience, this poignant novel explores the transformative power of forgiveness and the pursuit of one’s own identity in the face of adversity.
I’ve always said that to truly know my mother, you had to know her deprivation. This novel is my mother’s story. I hope that I’ve gotten the facts as she came to understand them right, but more importantly I hope that in my fiction I’ve arrived at her truth. I’m thankful for the opportunity I had to drive her across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge to Brooklyn, where she rediscovered her childhood home.
Order the book on:
Blind Eye
“This bruising story is less a murder mystery than an unflinching look at a culture and community.”
— Kirkus Reviews
At the Bounty Canyon Ranch in Southeastern New Mexico, the bodies of Luke and Deona Pruitt are buried in a manure pit and their 14-year-old son Leeland Pruitt is missing.
Deputy Sheriff Greenwood is called out to investigate the missing Pruitt family and discovers the grim scene. Leeland’s brutal upbringing was an open secret overlooked by neighbors and teachers for years. The community turned a blind eye as Leeland was moved by his cruel father from one remote ranch to another. And so, Deputy Greenwood begins a twenty-four-hour hunt to find and save the boy suspected of murdering his parents.
Blind Eye is both a tragedy and a dilemma of moral conscience. In this tale of cultural complicity, the community, at best, looked the other way and, at worst, enabled abuse, leaving us all to ask, ‘What is too much to ask of a boy?’
Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist
New Mexico -Arizona Book Award Winner for Fiction in the category: “Other.”
Reviews
Across the Narrows
“Burns, a skillful wordsmith, has delivered an addictive read.”
— Kirkus Reviews
Blind Eye
“This is not a book you’ll read for its pure entertainment value. In fact, it might break your heart. What it will do is make you think and help you decide what your responsibility to community, neighbors and the weak among us truly is. This is the story of an innocent child and the people who turned a blind eye to his painful upbringing. Even those who cared for him stood by and watched him suffer. The book, set in the vast space and small towns of New Mexico, take place in the recent past. We learn —maybe more than we’re comfortable knowing — the depths poverty of soul may acquire in this beautifully crafted tale of murder and abuse. I won’t be surprised to see Martha Burns’s story garnering writing awards.”
— Carol Crigger, Roundup Magazine
“Blind Eye left me gutted. Burns’s artfully simple prose is a gateway to dimensions of character and setting that few writers access so keenly.”
— Doug Kurtz, The Story Coach
“An engrossing crime tale that would make a lean and mean movie.”
“Burns crafts vividly compelling scenes that describe the danger of rural isolation and the laments of neighbors who too late regretted their own ‘blind eye’ and collective failure to act.”
— Kate Nelson, Managing Editor New Mexico Magazine