Finding Sagrado

A Teenage Odyssey for Adults and Mature Teenage Readers Roger E. Carrier tells an engaging story of youth, redemption, and sexual coming of age in New Mexico. In 1971, seventeen-year-old Shane Russell makes a well-planned escape from a Michigan winter and sets off on a 2,000-mile adventure in search of a town that exists only between the covers of Richard Bradford’s famous New Mexico novel Red Sky at Morning (J.B. Lippincott, 1968). Driven to recreate the nude scenes and vivid characters in Bradford’s fictional town of Sagrado, Shane forever touches the lives of his widowed landlady, the detective hired to find him, and his new friends at a colorful high school deep in the Land of Enchantment. Against the backdrop of his father’s death in Vietnam and life with his stepmother’s new boyfriend, Shane flees the painful realities of his life. In doing so, he finds a place where bats fly and love heals the wounds of the human spirit. He also encounters Mark Twain’s great truth: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”