Awards
Winner of the first Bellwether Prize named by Barbara Kingsolver.
Synopses & Reviews
Selected as the first winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize,
Kissing the Virgin's Mouth is a beautifully written, lyrical first novel that offers a rare window into another culture. Its irresistible heroine takes the reader into her Mexican world and the experience is unforgettable.
Barbara Kingsolver founded the Bellwether Prize in support of a literature of social change. In her words, Donna Gershten's novel has "the kind of political boldness and complexity we're hoping to promote with this prize. It sets a standard for what we're defining as a literature of social responsibility."
Kissing the Virgin's Mouth is the fictional memoir of Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vásquez -- wife, scoundrel, courtesan, and mother. In a world where gender and class roles are unbending, and religion predominant, Magda creates a philosophy of life that she can thrive in, a religion of cynical optimism, pragmatism, and determined gratitude. The invincible yet fallible Magda climbs from the poor barrio of a coastal Mexican town to American affluence, from wide-eyed childhood to worldly courtesan life, from full-blooded youth to oncoming blindness.
In the Golden Zone of Teatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico, where tourists and wealthy Mexicans thrive and where poor Mexicans come only to work or to visit the shrine of the miracle baby Jesus, Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vásquez performs her daily ritual. In the chair of her beloved Tía Chucha, mortared to the roof of her Golden Zone home, Magda shaves her long legs, tells her life stories, and thrusts her fierce prayers of gratitude toward the Sea of Cortés.
"More cabrón than hunger is the person who has suffered it," Magda says, and in her unsentimental and savvy fashion, she recounts her life strategies -- seasoned with an earthy, hard-earned wisdom -- so that she might pass them along to her half-American daughter, Martina, and to her young Mexican cousin, Isabel.
Kissing the Virgin's Mouth is a novel about love, the power of sex, and the struggles of women. It is about the secrets of survival. It is about what a woman can do.
Review
"What a fine, stern, generous moral imagination Donna Gershten brings to this ambitious first novel. No reader will soon forget the wonderful, brave Magda Molina Vasquez." Richard Russo, author of Straight Man and Empire Falls
Review
"Vivid, sexy, generous, and bold, Kissing the Virgin's Mouth radiates the heat of its remarkable heroine." Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal
Review
"First I fell for the music of her voice, her passion, and the timbre of her prose, but finally what won me was the strength and breadth of her vision of women as mothers and daughters, citizens and whores utterly pragmatic dreamers with the grace to give thanks from the heart." Ruth L. Ozeki, author of My Year of Meats
Review
Gershten pens a stunning debut novel and the first winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for a work of socially or politically engaged fiction. Magda climbs from the poor barrio of a Mexican town to American affluence, from wide-eyed childhood to worldly courtesan life, from full-blooded youth to oncoming blindness in middle age.
Review
“Captivating…full of passion and courage…a work of insight and imagination, as well as narrative strength and seductive language.” Washington Post Book World
Review
“Lively and pungent…[Gershten] makes Magdalena a rich and contradictory characterand, moreover, a canny storyteller in her own right.” Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Donna M. Gershten was born in eastern North Carolina and later lived for some years in Sinaloa, Mexico, where she ran a fitness and community center. She returned to the United States, received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Warren Wilson College, and began to publish short stories in literary journals. Gershten now divides her time between the Huerfano Valley in southern Colorado and Denver. Kissing the Virgin's Mouth is her first novel.