All the Crooked Saints _ 9/30 - 10/4

All the Crooked Saints - Maggie Stiefvater
Here is a thing everyone wants: a miracle. Here is a thing everyone fear: what it takes to get one.

All the Crooked Saints
This week, I read the first eleven chapters of All the Crooked Saints. It's a story about the Soria family and the tiny Colorado town of Bicho Raro - and the people who live there. 

The Soria family has the power to perform miracles. For years, they've helped heal the pilgrims to Bicho Raro, but it's not that easy. Miracles come in sets of two, the first to recognize the darkness inside, and the second to banish it. Because the Sorias are only able to perform the first, they find their town crowded with half-healed pilgrims, all with results of their darkness. 

The Sorias don't pay much mind to the pilgrims, and the pilgrims don't pay much mind to the Sorias. All they really need is a visit to the Saint of Bicho Raro, Daniel Lupe Soria, to heal themselves. But when the two youngest Sorias, Beatriz and Joaquin, are forced to join with the pilgrims to save Daniel from himself, everything changes. 

What stuck out to me personally was how the disappearance of a family member forced some people to go against what they would normally do. Beatriz Soria is considered, townwide, to be the girl without feelings, but when she has to save her cousin, it reveals thoughts that even she didn't know were part of her. It also shows how the Sorias, who weren't able to interfere with the pilgrims' miracles, were eventually able to help them in the end. It wasn't just that they helped them; the pilgrims helped the Sorias in return. 

Any visitor to Bicho Raro, Colorado, is likely to find a landscape of dark saints, forbidden love, scientific dreams, miracle-mad owls, estranged affections, one or two orphans, and a sky full of watchful desert stars. 

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