Stone World

Joel Agee drew on his own childhood for this novel, which is a fictionalized account of his boyhood in the mid-to-late 1940s, when his mother moved from America to Mexico. He is the son of the writer James Agee. The story follows Peter, a six-year-old who finds himself in a small Mexican town. His mother, a classical musician, has left her husband, also a well-known musician, and married a German writer whom Peter calls his 'second father.'

The adults around Peter belong to a community of European expatriate communists and Mexican labor organizers, and they seem constantly tense and up to something. Peter stumbles onto meetings that go silent the moment he appears, and parties that collapse into political quarrels. Frida Kahlo attends one of these gatherings and makes a strong impression on the boy. His 'second father' longs for news from Germany and is so distracted that the poem he and Peter's mother are writing together stalls. A sense of tragedy hangs just beyond the edges of the story.

Peter, however, spends his days absorbed in the world around him. A Mexican woman who runs the household teaches him Spanish, and he befriends a local boy whom he slowly realizes is poor. When he tries to give his friend one of his marbles, the friend's mother beats the boy and accuses him of stealing it. Still, the two boys roam the town and the surrounding countryside together and discover that it is full of fascinating and wondrous things. Peter grows attached to the place and the people in his life, even as the adults around him grow more strained and begin to hint that things may soon change.