Sara Bowley has been languishing at Maison d'Arbutus, a mental health facility for the upper middle-class, for four years. Her spouse Alexander secured her stay. He has taken control of her finances and he and their eleven-year-old daughter, Casey, are currently living in Santa Rosa de Lima, in the small fictional country of Ixcheltlán. Amid her institutionalization and pharma-fueled haze, Sara believes this is likely best for her daughter and consoles herself by looking forward to Casey's regular correspondence, which keeps the two connected no matter how far, and how much time goes by.

But, when Sara receives a troubling postcard from her daughter, everything changes and Sara promptly leaves the world she knows to travel to Central America to rescue her daughter from a vague, but imminent danger. Without money or transport, Sara hops a Greyhound bus to San Diego from Vancouver riding on chicken buses and hitchhiking through Mexico and Guatemala, in search of her child. She makes it to her spouse's home in a rich conclave of Santa Rosa de Lima, but the Sara Bowley who walks through the door there is not the Sara who left West Vancouver a month before. And the house that she enters is not just a home, but a hostile maze through which Sara must find her way to her now uncommunicative child before it is too late.

Magnificat: Song of Justice, is a story of two women on separate paths, one a North American woman's journey to social consciousness, and on the other, a tale of a campesina named Maria Luz who seeks to lead her people to an alternative to the war that is devastating her country. When these two paths converge, Sara comes to believe in the wisdom of the campesina, and embraces a radical change in her life, but the shadow of death soon descends on them both, threatening to destroy all that they have set out to accomplish.

Kathleen S. Schmitt's profile page

Kathleen S. Schmitt has authored three volumes of Seasons of the Feminine Divine: Christian Feminist Prayers. She has published short stories and poetry in literary magazines and anthologies, as well as the novel Conversations with Amelia, and the young adult novel, Getting a Life. A retired Anglican Priest, Kathleen served for three years in the parish of Santisima Trinidad in San Martín, El Salvador.Magnificat: Song of Justice is based on the author's interest in the concept of a female Christ figure in the context of liberation theology, and her post-war volunteerism in El Salvador in the 1980s. She lives in Burnaby, BC. www.justiceworks.ca