Iris, India, and Singing Bird. Theirs is an uneasy alliance - a makeshift trinity of mother, daughter, and ambiguously holy spirit - that together forges a family of necessity. The fates of these women and their loved ones are inextricably linked by the powerful magic of the talisman known as the Life Stone.

The adult eyes of India Baldoon Walker unfold the narrative: her mother's grinding journey west, including her murdered husband and stillborn baby, and the discovery of a Native American infant boy who becomes India's adopted brother, Boy Found. As the two children grow into adults, their individual heritages prove to be insurmountable and their harmonious co-existence is shattered.

And so began - though few knew it at the time (least of all Joe) - the great Milagro beanfield war.

But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than battlefield victories. Gradually, ever so fumblingly, the small farmers and sheepmen began to rally to Joe's beanfield as the symbol of their lost rights and their lost lands. And downstate in the capital, the Anglo water barons and power brokers huddled in urgent conference, intent on destroying that symbol before it destroyed their multimillion-dollar land-development schemes.

The tale of Milagro's rising is widly comic and lovingly tender, a vivid portrayal of a town that, half-stumbling and partly prodded, groped its way toward it own stubborn salvation.