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MacMurray & Beck 1999
When Kate Banner, an American midwife in Nicaragua, loses another patient - a young woman who had given birth only the night before in the bottom of a swamped boat - she knows it's time to go home. But traveling home leads her to a stopover in Guatemala, where even children sometimes disappear. In Hummingbird House a woman struggles to face new territories of love and war in the middle of her life. This is a moving and emotionally trustworthy tale of a human heart unbinding itself in the most unjust of worlds.
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Hummingbird House was a long journey. It was ten years from the moment I began thinking about the story until I held the book in hand. I made five trips to Central America, interviewed countless people, and abandoned the first 200 pages to begin over again when I felt the voice wasn't right. I finished the book while on sabbatical in New Mexico, writing at the dining room table, with a view of the Sangre de Christo Mountains.
Writing this book changed my life. I had always been concerned about the fate of children during war time, but studying the events in Central America galvanized my activism.
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From the Citation from the National Book Awards Foundation
"Hummingbird House celebrates the human in the midst of despair. Set in a world of Sandinistas and Contras, of torture and death squads, Patricia Henley's novel takes us into the life of one American woman who becomes part of a community where trust is as vital as bread and just as rare. With deliberate craft and enormous compassion, Henley shows us how one exhausted woman exchanges numbness for resolution, and then chooses - to witness, to act, and to live regardless of what is lost."
From Hungry Mind Review
"Patricia Henley sets the tone for Hummingbird House, her brooding, tragic, and accomplished first novel, in the aftermath of a hurricane. The scene is Nicaragua, circa 1988. Kate, a 42-year-old midwife from Indiana, whose mind we inhabit for most of the book, is musing over her efforts to help improve the lives of women and children in this destitute, war-ravaged land. For more years than she cares to tally, she has performed this demanding work. Bone-tired and soul-sick, she looks to the clearing sky where 'orange bolts of cloud blew away and away, out to sea, like a bandage being removed from a sensitive scar.' This startling image, the product of a healer's subconscious, weds beauty to pain and signals the dichotomies of the harrowing story to come."
From Booklist
"Henley has written a strongly political first novel that avoids being merely a polemic only because she has managed to make Kate a sympathetic, believable character, whose thoughts and reactions seem both honest and real."
From National Catholic Reporter
"It is not always easy to share the tragic lives of the characters, but Henley makes the experience rewarding and brings the reader to share in the strong peace that Kate finds by the story's end."
From the Austin American-Statesman
"This brilliant and heartfelt novel provides a pathway to hope."
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