Crazy Woman

kate horsley

"Sane and shrewd and funny...The story of a woman whose captivity is divided equally between her life with her own people and her life among the Indians."
LILLIAN SCHISSEL
Author of WOMEN'S DIARIES OF THE WESTWARD JOURNEY
Sara Franklin is an outcast among her own white people. Her thirst for knowledge and spirituality is threatening to both her abusive father and her neurotic husband. When she is captured by the Apaches in New Mexico, they dub her "Crazy Woman," and treat her like a slave. Yet, as she begins to learn the ways of her captors, she earns their respect as a strong, clever, even magical, woman. And when her innate sensual hunger is tempted, challenged, and finally satisfied by an Apache warrior, Sara finally embraces her whole self at last, body and soul....

Genres fictionhistorical fiction

280 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 31,1992

This edition

Format: 280 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published: March 2, 1994 by Ivy Books
ISBN: 9780804112321
ASIN: 0804112320
Language: English

About the author

kate horsley

Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1952, Kate Horsley Parker, the youngest of five children, loved to read. Her mother, Alice Horsley Parker, inspired that love, which is part of the reason that she chose to write under her mother's maiden name. In her mother's world, young women were to be educated and refined and passionate. While in a private girl's school in Virginia during the sixties, Horsley protested against the Vietnam War and worked in the Civil Rights movement. And then she went off to college and off to Paris for summer school. Every event in life was marked by a book, an almost prophetic glimpse into what would become a passion. After reading a book by Alan Watts, Horsley's flirtation with Zen Buddhism became a lifelong fling. Flying to Paris, she read Black Elk Speaks, one of several works on or by Native Americans that inspired her to move to the West. It was her Masters Thesis work on Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Silko that propelled her to travel to New Mexico where she has lived since 1977. She got a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. The research she did on women in the American West inspired her to make novels out of the dimly known but awesome lives of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Horsley has been teaching college English in New Mexico for over twenty years and is involved in hospice work.

Horsley dedicated her first published novel to her mother, and the other five to her son Aaron, who died at the age of eighteen in 2000.