Las Vegas

"[Carlo] says Reno is just like Las Vegas, but bigger, with more lights. Which must be quite a lot, because where I live, it never gets really dark at night. I can always see the Strip glowing, usually kind of white but sometimes kind of pink. And there is a big light on top of a pyramid that points right at our apartment, like a laser. Tirana is afraid of that light, but I tell her that it's a spotlight shining at us so we could never be lost. I suppose God doesn't really need a spotlight to know where Tirana and I are, but I don't know that much about God, and I think it is good to have that backup light." -Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

Among the tufts of bermudagrass and the burned red dirt of Las Vegas, Nevada, four individuals are struggling to glean beauty from heartbreak. There's Bashkim Ahmeti, a second-grader whose Albanian refugee parents operate an ice cream truck until disaster strikes during a routine traffic stop. Specialist Luis Rodriguez-Reyes returns home after a traumatic deployment to Iraq. Middle-aged housewife Avis Briggs learns of her husband's affair and must sweep up the scraps of her marriage while working to steady the emotions of her troubled soldier-turned-police officer son, Nate. And Roberta Weiss, a volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate for children in splintered households, is learning how to mend the broken parts of someone else's life while doing the same with her own.

Las Vegas proves the perfect setting for a story that knits together death and rebirth, vast, isolating expanses and suffocating claustrophobia. In the 1820s, members of a Spanish scouting expedition stumbled upon a verdant land teeming with rivers and artesian wells. Christened Las Vegas ("the meadows"), the region became a popular water stop for wagon caravans and, later, trains en route to destinations such as Los Angeles or Albuquerque. Over time, the extensive network of rivers sank into the ground and Las Vegas grew parched, able to sustain only the hardiest of plant and animal species--a once-pulsating, fertile corner of the earth that literally collapsed into itself.

In Laura McBride's debut novel, the idea of Las Vegas as nurturer and punisher is echoed in the stories of each character. The city is a sanctuary to Bashkim and his family after his father is held as a political prisoner in Albania. For Luis, it is the suburbs beyond the buzz of the Strip that help to steady his war-addled mind. Avis has found comfort and stability in the decades spent in one single home. Roberta sees life and hope particularly among those who appear to be caving into themselves just as the city once did. But what Las Vegas giveth, Las Vegas can taketh away. By the end of the novel, Bashkim has suffered a terrible loss and finds himself and his sister dropped unceremoniously into the foster care system. Luis returns from war haunted by the image of the young boy he killed, only to encounter another boy--Bashkim--in a region that, aside from the buildings and the people, could be the very desert battlefield he left behind. After worrying that she had chosen to raise her son in a place nicknamed "Sin City," Avis is starting to understand the many manifestations of the phrase. Roberta finds that despite her best intentions, she is helpless to match the needs of thousands of children impacted in one way or another by the city's vices.

Somehow, though, through the violence and the racism and the post-traumatic stress, despite Las Vegas's sinking rivers (and, perhaps, because of them), life continues. Spotted knapweed spreads across the hillsides like a blush. Barrel cacti and purple arrowweed spread their roots in the dry, arid soil and do not mourn the rain. Mexican wolves and bighorn sheep and collared peccaries roam the harsh landscape. And Bashkim and Luis, Avis and Roberta, are learning to settle, too, each one in an environment that is challenging but not altogether unforgiving. Each one in an environment that is maybe exactly what they need to thrive.