Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.

Joe Mondragon, thirty-six with not much to show for it, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully, if impulsively (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began -- though few knew it at the time -- the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork...

Nine-year-old Josefina, the youngest of four sisters living in New Mexico in 1824, tries to help run the household after her mother dies.

When Tia Dolores, the beloved aunt who has cared for the Montoya family since the death of their mother, announces that she is planning to leave, Josefina and her sisters try to find a way to change her mind.

Josefina discovers that she has a gift for healing when she tends an orphaned baby goat, finds the courage and creativity to mend her family's broken trust in an americano trader, and seeks to keep her family whole and happy when Tía Dolores plans to leave.

Josefina hopes to become a "curandera" or healer like Tia Magdalena, and she is tested just before her tenth birthday when a friend receives a potentially fatal snakebite.

While Sonny Baca and friends are enjoying Albuquerque's famed hot air balloon festival, a woman plummets from the sky. Four black feathers surround her body -- the calling card of Sonny's nemesis from "Zia Summer," Raven. Raven possesses powers no mortal can match; and Sonny knows that he is the only one who can defeat him. Drawing on his own guardians, and with the help of a "curandera," Sonny risks his life for his city -- and the survival of the...