The author, born in the Andean region of Peru, completed hgih school, and came to the United States where she completed her university studies and taught at the University of Maine. Her novel Ximena at the Crossroads, selected as Best Novel of the Year and Best Prose Written by a Woman in Peru in 1994, also won the 1995 Latino Prize in Literature in the category of fiction.

Ximena is the young daughter of a wealthy couple living on an hacienda in the highlands of the Andean mountains of Peru. Her parents shelter her and pamper her, providing her with education, a safe home, and loving care. She seeks knowledge of anything outside the realm of what her parents allow, often resorting to pictures, conversations, observations, and stepping outside of the physical boundaries imposed upon her by her parents.

XIMENA AT THE CROSSROADS succeeds at so many levels. The chapters work as a developing novel or simply as short stories. Each is beautiful in its own right. There is variation in tense and person as the novel progesses. At one point, with the use of second person, the reader is taken into the novel itself and becomes Ximena! The story reveals how differences among people affect one child. There is a sense of the uneven way in which a child learns about the world through observation, pictures, stories, and conversations--often fusing fact with fantasy--and how fragmented the input is, always colored or filtered by what adults keep secret from a child. The message of social injustice becomes clearer toward the end of the novel as Ximena becomes directly involved in a dangerous situation. For a colorful and lush novel about a child’s learning about her world, this is a novel not to be missed.