Alicia Ortega, a 14-year-old Mexican girl, struggles to protect her father’s land when she and her older sisters are aggressively courted by land-hungry Yankees and rough-cut fur traders in the Spanish colony. It’s up to Alicia, her sister Clara, and their Chumash friend Nina to shoulder the responsibility of caring for the Ortega home and business.
When Alicia’s oldest sister is sent to finishing school in Texas for protection and refinement, the remaining younger sisters must run the rancho alone. Dangers on all sides begin to descend as the sisters are pursued by Yankee immigrant merchants and sailors hoping to cash in on rich lands and access to Pacific ports.
Alicia is trying her best to keep her family’s home and business afloat and thankfully, her companion, Nina is there to help. But as an indigenous girl, Nina is valuable to traders, trappers, and surveyors for her knowledge of the Californian terrain and her network of tribal relations. However, she won’t always be there to help Alicia’s family, especially since she has problems of her own. The Franciscan Mission is pressuring her family to convert to Catholicism, a charming trader is courting her, and, worse of all, their tribal territory and tribal ways are vanishing.
The girls struggle to protect the Ortega family’s land and black market dock from conniving suitors, but tough family secrets are threatening everything, and Alicia doesn’t know if they’ll be able to survive until her parents return.
Dr. Perez Ferguson is a cross-cultural educator and consultant. Her fiction brings to life the voices of California inhabitants living 200 years ago. She has twice won the Best YA Fiction Award from the San Francisco Writers Conference, 2021 and 2022.
Regarding Broken Promises:
"The tightly wound plot flows effortlessly from one moment to the next.... readers will find themselves inspired by the future Sparrow creates for herself and those around her." — Kirkus Reviews
Her non-fiction promotes the voices of under-represented communities in the twenty-first century. This earned her the 2014 Lacayo Lifetime Achievement Award from the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute. She is an Advisor and Former Chair for the InterAmerican Foundation and a former Visiting Lecturer for the Council for Independent Colleges. She enjoys living and writing on the Pacific coast.
Have you ever imagined writing your own book? The story, characters, and plot are foremost in an author's thinking. One of the last steps prior to book production is the creation of an interesting cover. Based on the design elements of the genre and content of the book, your cover will speak to would-be readers. It may be the deciding reason for a reader's choice. How many times have you picked up a book because it looked interesting? Cover art must lead a reader into the plot without giving away the ending of the story. The cover for Golden Secrets gives you a sense of the time and location of the book elements. There are little hidden elements in the artwork that the reader understands as the story unfolds. Thanks for taking the time to investigate my Golden Secrets.
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