Product Description
A jilted husband with a grudge, a bomb, and a dead wife; three mothers facing life and death; a warrior in a battle with his memory; a man at odds with the stereotypes surrounding him; an immigrant looking for fortune in the wrong places; and a woman who can't stop running for her life. These are the subjects of a woman with a gift, a woman who has already lost everything. Through her art, she hopes to see them all through different eyes while serving penance among the denizens of a town once dead.
An artist sits at a table in a casino in Cripple Creek, Colorado. She is broken, alone, and she is waiting. She's waiting for redemption, waiting for a chance to prove she can really see through someone else's eyes. And as she waits, she sketches those around her, those who keep their secrets buried deep. It's not simply something she wants to do; it's something she has to do, and it might just save a life.
While all people have secrets, the artist quickly learns that some of them are every bit as dark as her own. There is the immigrant looking for fortune and finding death along the way. There is the woman running for her life, desperate to hide in a small town that is, for its own sake, trying to live again. There is the angry man, jilted by his now-dead wife, looking for revenge. There is the veteran who can't remember, the woman about to lose her mother, and the drunk who doesn't want to be what people see on the outside. There are more people, everywhere, behind every turn of the card, and all of them have secrets.
Sketches from the Spanish Mustang weaves each person's story--both intriguing and magical--into a single narrative about love, death, penance and peace. As the mystery of the woman's sketches unfolds, the lives of her subjects unravel with it. This is the artist's gift: to uncover the hidden in life. Yet gifts can be curses, and curses can be secrets. For the artist, remembering is penance. Through the eyes of the woman who is forced to spend her life attempting to correct her own misguided view of those around her, the reader is given an opportunity to see more than the vagrant, more than the alcoholic, more than the immigrant or the woman running from her past. The novel breaks down stereotypes and allows the reader to peer into the eyes of the people we all turn away from.
Praise for Sketches from the Spanish Mustang:
"This is my second story by this author, and it reinforces my opinion of his skill as a storyteller, of his very natural way with words and emotion, and of his very capable way of moving the reader to where he, the author, desires you to be." -- S.Richards, Amazon.com Top 500 Reviewer
"Wretlind has an amazing descriptive style that paints a very vivid picture of his characters and setting." -- Jeff Currie, author of Judgment Tramp
About the Author
Benjamin ran with scissors when he was five. He now writes. He has been--at different times, of course--a fry cook, range boy, greens maintenance technician, reservations agent, room service attendant, editor, banquet server, meteorologist, instructor, program manager for Internet applications, curriculum developer and simulation engineer. The author of Castles: A Fictional Memoir of a Girl with Scissors and Sketches from the Spanish Mustang, Benjamin has been called "a Pulitzer-caliber writer" with "a unique American voice." Aside from novels, he has been published in many magazines to include The Horror Express, All Hollows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society, Horror Carousel and Bare Bones. He also gets up before 4am to milk (words, not cows). He is engaged to a wonderful and creative woman and has five kids, a dog, a hamster and two fish. You can find Benjamin psychoanalyzing himself on his blog (http://bxwretlind.com/) or lounging about in the Twitterverse (@bxwretlind).
