WELCOME TO SAINT ANGEL

KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF OUR LAND!
Welcome To Saint Angel is a story of development gone mad. When his professor wife and her lesbian lover die in a plane crash, Al Sharpe moves from San Diego to the high desert with his young daughter Finley to begin a new life in the canyons of Second Chance Acres. They build a sprawling tree house in live oaks, and Al finds his gift as an inventor. But once development begins in Saint Angel, amity ends. The town splits into warring camps: Al’s “Dirt Faction” friends versus Ches Noonan’s developer pals, who buy up Saint Angel Valley and seize its water supply. Hills are flattened and huge, ugly housing tracts go in everywhere; owls and coyote choruses vanish with the quiet nights. Their home under siege by L.A. suburbs metastasizing into the desert like a devious cancer, Al and his friends fight back. When Ches Noonan invites Realtors to Saint Angel for a “Realty Roundup,” they respond with a “Realty Revenge,” planting scorpions in Realtors’ motel rooms and infusing drinking water with ersatz blood to scare them away; hacker genius Tinkerspoon reroutes planes from LAX to buzz town, and local La Cienega del Diablo Indians put on war paint. It’s a pitched battle between land rich Saint Angelinos and small land holders, which turns violent at times. “You can’t stop progress,” Ches Noonan says, but in the book’s madcap ending, Al and his friends manage to do just that, with a little help from mother nature.

Praise for Welcome To Saint Angel:

“Every time we allow ourselves to settle back into the deep currents of William Luvaas’s WELCOME TO SAINT ANGEL, imagining we see what he’s doing and where he’s going, we find ourselves in new waters, trying to master different strokes. And what an amazing ride this accomplished writer takes us on—through heartache and mystery, laughter and sweet vengeance. Beyond everything, he makes us truly welcome, welcome inside an endangered environment that asks from us what so many here in Saint Angel have to offer. Without ever hectoring us, Luvaas reforms our thoughts and our capacities to fit a world both harder and more loving than we had previously ever supposed. It is a word badly overused, but this novel really is the product of a true brilliance.
– James Kincaid, Author of Erotic Innocence and You Must Remember This

Between Outrage and Hilarity: William Luvaas’s Welcome To Saint Angel
“All wounds are ripe for reopening in this sure-fire satire of contemporary America; social divisions and bitter personal animosities; wealth, possessions and power versus the assertion of individual rights; arrogant, rapacious humankind versus vulnerable nature; the corruption of politics and law enforcement, and so on.

“Fortunately, for the reader, this author’s passion—his anger, too—come wrapped in a healthy sense of the absurd. Dangerous plot lines veer off into farce. The people who drive them leap off into engaging parodies of themselves. And the reader is caught, along with Luvaas, in a parlous place somewhere between outrage and hilarity.”
– Peter Clothier in Los Angeles Review of Books
https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/outrage-hilarity-william-luuvass-welcome-saint-angel/

“Welcome To Saint Angel is a battle between people who can never have enough, wealthy people for whom the need for more victories is an addiction and those who oppose needless and heedless suburban sprawl that wreaks havoc on fragile environments….Welcome To Saint Angel is a love story. It’s about a love of the land, a love of place, a love of community, a love of humanity, flawed and full of missteps and mistakes as it may be. It’s about a love that connects people and places.”
– Elan Barnehama in Forth Magazine
https://forthmagazine.com/fiction/2018/04/the-community-minded/

“Hilariously unsparing, with just the right amount of satiric skewering, Bill once again puts his stamp on vital issues of our time with his spot-on, inventive plot and zany cast of characters. And the questions Bill sets out to answer are right out of today’s headlines. Who decides what is the appropriate balance between preservation and progress? Who decides (and gets to bequeath) our nation’s natural inheritance? Who decides when enough is enough—on either side of an issue? A terrific book by one of America’s top writers.”
– Larry Leichman, Publisher of Arbor Books

OTHER PRESS AND INTERVIEWS:

– Interview with Norm Goldman in BookPleasures.Com:
http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/articles/8502/1/In-Conversation-With-William-Luvaas/

– Interview with Carol Smallwood, Into The Void Magazine:
https://intothevoidmagazine.com/2018/05/11/multi-award-winning-author-william-luvaas-knows-the-power-of-perseverance/

– The Pen and Muse:
http://thepenmuse.net/welcome-saint-angel-william-luvaas/

– Interview with Lisa Haselton on her Reviews & Interviews Blog
https://lisahaseltonsreviewsandinterviews.blogspot.com/2018/02/interview-with-novelist-william-luvaas.html

EXCERPT FROM HASELTON INTERVIEW:

Haselton: “What inspired you to write this book?”

Luvaas: “I was living in the high desert in Riverside County, California and writing short stories focusing on the scrappy, inimitable characters that often occupy desert country, who are as rugged as the environment itself. I’ve always been attracted to outsiders and social rebels in my work, and they abound in the high desert. Moreover, I often set books and stories in places where I am living when I write them, which have included Oregon, New York City, Upstate N.Y., Mendocino, CA, San Diego, and recently the SoCal high desert. In a sense, my work grows out of the local soil and is compelled by the people and issues of the region. I wrote the first draft of S.A. during those lunatic years of the subprime housing boom; Riverside County was one of its epicenters. Heedless developers were throwing up houses all sides without a thought for the local people or the fragile environment, turning the chaparral country into a suburban nightmare, with huge, ugly houses crowded together cheek by jowl where had once been farms and orchards and open country, guzzling up our meager water supply. I was angered and heartbroken by this intrusion and felt compelled to write about it. Mankind’s threat to the environment has long been a major theme in my work—and here it was happening around me. Moreover, at that time I was engaged in an effort to stop greedy developers from building a huge housing tract in our neighborhood, which would destroy its rural character, chase off the owls and coyotes, and knock down palms and olive trees. We successfully fought them off. That effort, too, helped inspire the novel and provided grist for the mill.”