Las Palomitas (The Little Doves): A Story of El Salvador

Product Description Originally written as the Salvadoran civil war ended in the early 1990s, Las Palomitas, like a fine wine, has reached its prime as the 21st century unfolds with new challenges. Ostensibly the story of an out-of-place American who has found his own slice of paradise in a fishing hamlet in El Salvador, Las Palomitas operates on numerous levels, from the simplicity of village life to the complicated echelons of government and high society. A tale of a disillusioned American college student who stumbled onto a peaceful life of fishing on a Salvadoran beach, life gets complicated when he falls in love with a recently-returned young village woman with a past most byzantine and deadly than his own. Together, they provide inspiration and comfort to one another, a state of affairs that neither can maintain. As the Salvadoran civil war begins and their worlds collide, they struggle to save one another and others whom they love in the village of Las Palomitas, The Little Doves. About the Author Laura L. Valenti has been a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers for nearly 40 years and a novelist for the past decade. A former resident of El Salvador, she has been a volunteer mission worker in several Latin American countries and in and out of the region since childhood. While Las Palomitas is a work of fiction, it is one borne of her passion for the people of El Salvador and the Latin culture that has permeated her entire life. Always interested in Latin America, she has spent the past four decades in another small paradise, living, learning and writing about the people of the Ozarks, including seven popular regional novels. She has held a variety of jobs over the years including horse wrangler and trail guide, bi-lingual clerk and office administrator, law enforcement office manager, county jail administrator, and working board member and off site manager of a women's Christian half-way house as well as novelist and local writer. She and her husband, Warren raised four children and have several grandsons in Missouri and Texas. They remain sequestered in the Ozark hills, another picturesque fishing sanctuary, far from much of the madness that is the modern world.