Across a Hundred Mountains: A Novel

Winner of the American Book Award, Across a Hundred Mountains is a “timely and riveting” (People) novel about a young girl who leaves her small town in Mexico to find her father, who left his family to work in America—a story of migration, loss, and discovery.

After a tragedy separates her from her mother, Juana García leaves in search of her father, who left them two years earlier. Out of money and in need of someone to help her across the border, Juana meets Adelina Vasquez, a young woman who left her family in California to follow her lover to Mexico. Finding themselves—in a Tijuana jail—in desperate circumstances, they offer each other much needed material and spiritual support and ultimately become linked forever in the most unexpected of ways.

In Across a Hundred Mountains, Reyna Grande puts a human face on the controversial issue of immigration, helping readers to better understand “the desperation of illegal immigrants and the families they leave behind” (Entertainment Weekly) in pursuit of a better life.

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author, motivational speaker, and writing teacher. As a girl, she crossed the US–Mexico border to join her family in Los Angeles, a harrowing journey chronicled in The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist that has been adopted as the common read selection by over twenty schools and colleges and fourteen cities across the country. Her other books include the novels Across a Hundred Mountains, winner of a 2007 American Book Award, and Dancing with Butterflies, and The Distance Between Us, Young Reader’s Version. She lives in Woodland, CA with her husband and two children. Visit ReynaGrande.com.

ISBN: 9780743269582
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Published: May 15, 2007

"Across a Hundred Mountains is a beautifully rendered novel that maintains its power throughout....A breathtaking debut."

-- El Paso Times"Elegantly written...a timely and riveting read."

-- People"Grande's heartfelt [novel] addresses a worthy subject -- the desperation of illegal immigrants and the families they leave behind."

-- Entertainment Weekly"Reyna Grande beguiles with the spare, unadorned prose of a fabulist, then stuns with emotional truths of shattering complexity....A tale full of memorable characters and even more memorable truths."

-- Javier Grillo-Marxuach, writer/producer of Lost and Boomtown"Grande's deft portraiture endows even the smallest characters with grace."

-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)