"Try to see me the way I see myself, an Indian woman wrapped in her blanket by the fire, telling you a story she has to tell. But you might as well know, you will find out soon enough, that I am a red-headed gringo woman, living in Santa Fe under an assumed name.".

Thus begins Constance Warloe's astonishing literary debut, suffused with the wisdom of Native American legend and lore, and with the heartbreaking beauty of the American Southwest. It is the fluidly written, beautifully moving story of Olivia Cosmos Montevideo, a.k.a. Roberta Patterson Masters, a woman whose life as a housewife and mother has always left her frustrated by her failure to answer her own deep intellectual and spiritual needs.

The inadequacy of her home life, however, escalates abruptly to a stark lack of meaning when in 1970 her son, Gary, is killed in Vietnam. Unable to communicate with her husband about this loss or about their life, she leaves him, consumed with grief.

1. Heading aimlessly west, she lands in Santa Fe, where, with the freedom of a new name and a new lover, she comes to terms with herself beyond her identity as wife and mother. Touched by the healing power of the land, the comfort of stories, and the magic of art, she is able to integrate her old self into a woman profoundly empowered and powerfully new, The Legend of Olivia Cosmos Montevideo is engagingly, touchingly, and wholly human in its revelation of the emotional journey from tragedy to rebirth.