About the Books

Across the Narrows

Poignant and engaging, with strong female characters.” 
— Kirkus Reviews

Martha Burns book cover Across the Narrows
Martha Burns mother

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.

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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?’

seal Western Writers of America

Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist

Martha Burns Blind Eye book cover

Reviews

Across the Narrows

Across the Narrows is author Martha Burns’s mother Alice’s story of her search for truth about the tragic events that impacted their family decades ago. Burns tells Alice’s story with a compassionate voice inspired by real family events. She writes from the heart, engaging readers with carefully crafted sentences. It takes a skilled writer to be able to write a plausible story while weaving in events and information uncovered in research. As dark family secrets unravel throughout the story there exists the need for family members to learn forgiveness for their healing to begin. The novel is a sweeping family saga spread out over decades.

The novel begins with Ruby’s story in 1924 just after giving birth to a stillborn named Faith. The following year she gives birth to her last baby Alice, the author’s mother. Ruby comes to the realization of how societal norms have trapped her in a certain role compounded by the frustration of wanting to be a writer. A loveless marriage with her Colombian husband Juan spurs her on to sue for legal separation. But her efforts are thwarted with a counter lawsuit resulting in Juan being granted custody of their six children. He flees the state with the family leaving Ruby abandoned and heartbroken.

The core of the story is Ruby who has to learn forgiveness and how to trust others again while crafting out a different life than she ever imagined for herself. Halfway through the novel, the story transitions into Alice’s narrative. She’s on a quest for answers trying to locate her mother Ruby and to uncover the “why” of being abandoned as a 5-year-old. Despite their reconnection in later years Ruby and Alice find reconciliation requires forgiveness. Alice discovers her mother Ruby has taken on an unexpected role and a satisfying one as a braille teacher and fulfilled her lifelong dream of becoming a writer.

As the reader, I became emotionally involved in the story. When Ruby and Alice reconnected the story’s narrative switched from Ruby to Alice, I had hoped to learn more about Ruby’s adult life and what her conversation might have been like with her daughter Alice. For me, it was a missing piece I was looking for. The book title references the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge to Brooklyn. It spans the Narrows, a body of water linking the New York Harbor with the Lower New York. The bridge became symbolic to the story as Burns drove her mother Alice over to Brooklyn seeking answers to their family history. It was here in Brooklyn that Alice and her daughter discovered Alice’s childhood home, the Green-Wood cemetery where Faith was buried, and the church where Alice’s father once was a pastor. Their Brooklyn visit helped put closure on some past events. 

Across the Narrows is a beautifully written and heartfelt story that needs to be on your winter/spring book reading list.”

— Sue Ready, Ever Ready

Bind 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.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“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