This tale of a repressive priest and his small Mexican village during the eighteen months preceding the Revolution of 1910 is a great novel, one that exposes the struggle between human desire and paralyzing fearfear of humanity, fear of nature, fear of the wrath of God. Agust?n Y??ez probes the actions of people caught in lifes currents, enthralling his readers with mounting dramatic tension as he shows that no power can forge saints from the human masses, that any attempt to do so, in fact, often has exactly the opposite result.
Y??ez brings to his work a deep understanding of peoplehis peopleand he illuminates a great truththat no one, anywhere, seems very strange when we understand the environment that has produced him or her.