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Red Weather (Sun Tracks)
by Janet McAdams

Published: 2012-04-01
Paperback : 190 pages
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This trip wasn't about her, her need to escape. She had been too young when it happened. Too young to understand what could be worth risking everything for. Even now they seemed naïve, foolish in their belief that anything could change. They had tried to save a generation. If she ...
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Introduction

This trip wasn't about her, her need to escape. She had been too young when it happened. Too young to understand what could be worth risking everything for. Even now they seemed naïve, foolish in their belief that anything could change. They had tried to save a generation. If she couldn't save them, she might find a way to finish their story.

 
Neva Greene is seeking answers.
 
The daughter of American Indian activists, Neva hasn't seen or heard from her parents since they vanished a decade earlier, after planning an act of resistance that went terribly wrong. Discovering a long-overlooked clue to their disappearance, Neva follows their trail to Central America, leaving behind an uncaring husband, an estranged brother, and a life of lukewarm commitments.
 
Determined to solve the mystery of her parents' disappearance, Neva finds work teaching English in the capital city of tiny Coatepeque, a country torn by its government's escalating war on its Indigenous population. As the violence and political unrest grow around her, Neva meets a man whose tenderness toward her seems to contradict his shadowy political connections.
 
Against the backdrop of Central American politics, this suspenseful first novel from award-winning poet Janet McAdams explores an important chapter in American Indian history. Through finely drawn,  compelling characters and lucidly beautiful prose, Red Weather explores the journey from loss to possibility, from the secrets of the past to the longings of the present.

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Excerpt

 The Zona Rosa

“You must eat here a lot,” Neva said, after they had been seated at a small round table by a window overlooking the courtyard. The room smelled of eucalyptus and garlic. The maitre d’, then the waiters had nodded at Tomas in recognition. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

 1. Neva’s acknowledged reason for traveling to Central America is to look for her parents. What other reasons might she have? What reasons does she have to stay?

2. Identity is one of Neva’s important struggles. What different identities does she inhabit over the course of the novel? Do these different identities ever conflict with each other?

3. Why is Neva so reluctant to accept friendship with Deb and Kira?

4. What kinds of love are portrayed in this novel? What role does love play a role in the decisions that Neva makes?

5. Did the novel change or challenge your ideas about the lives of Native Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

6. Toward the end of the novel, Kira explains to Neva why she’s been working for the resistance movement in Coatepeque. “You have to do something,” she says. Do you agree? Is violence justified when its goal is to end injustice?

7. Similarly, do you think Neva’s parents were right in their choice to try to end the sterilization of Native American women, even though their actions, however inadvertently, resulted in the death of a young Indian man?

8. When Neva made the trip to La Loma, what did you expect her to discover?


Notes From the Author to the Bookclub

 Note from author Janet McAdams:

In the late 1980s, I spent a year in Central America teaching school. While I wrote poems about my experiences, I didn’t begin Red Weather for many years after. There were stories that wouldn’t let me go; they wanted to be told. And that is how I came to map the mythical country of Coatepeque and to discover my heroine Neva Greene, who is searching for what we all want to know—a way to understand the past and how it makes us who we are.

Janet

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