BOOK REVIEW

“Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands”

by Linda Ronstadt and Lawrence Downes

Heyday • 2022 • 297 pages •

$35

Reviewed

by Darcy Peters

Linda Ronstadt’s fans know that she is no longer singing these days due to her illness. So, she wrote this book, which started out to be a cookbook but developed into so much more. It became a lyrical and personal history of a family, of a people, and of a land. She incorporates passages from her grandfather’s book, which even has old letters written by her great-grandmother.

Ronstadt recalls: “I have never had a home in Sonora, but I get homesick for it. I feel pride in the connection––more than I do in San Francisco, where I have lived for years, and as much as I do in Tucson, the town I was born and raised in, five hours up the highway.” Her grandfather had a wagon business in Tucson, Arizona, which later became the hardware store her father ran all his life.

She digs into the history of the Sonoran region, which includes the beginnings of Indigenous people and her family stories of a rough life. “There’s something to be said for the way a land of extreme weather sharpens and stokes emotions in a way blander environments can’t. In blazing heat, a well-timed passing cloud or the blessed whisper of a breeze feel like an answered prayer. There’s relief and almost drunken delight when summer’s unbearable grip is finally broken by the wild monsoons of July and August.”

Music and food were always a part of Ronstadt’s family. Her grandfather, uncles, aunts and siblings all loved to sing. It was a natural part of all family celebrations. First, the food of their family, which included several of the recipes in this book, then came the music.

Ronstadt relates: “It’s hard to express how much we kids owed to our mom, dad and Ronstadt grandparents for the world of music we grew up in. The songs they gave us were the richest inheritance any children could hope for, and we started collecting it from the cradle. That’s what happens when you are saturated in song from earliest childhood, when melodies and harmonies and chords enter your body through your ears and skin, mingle with your brain cells, and nestle in your heart, the muscle beating a rhythm that keeps you going all your life.”

“I went back to my old neighborhood not long ago, in early spring. The creosote bushes were blooming, lush and butter-yellow, defying the dryness and heat.” The weather might have been sizzling, but she still had an appetite for “the flaky floury tortillas, as big as steering wheels and almost as light as Kleenex. For Caldo de queso, Sonoran cheese soup, a glistening broth bright with the heat of chiltepin chiles. And for carne asada, grilled over mesquite, and frijoles con chile and quince jelly and coffee roasted with sugar.”

Life has changed in the Tucson of Ronstadt’s history, “So I fall back on the music, the unbreakable chain of melody. It hasn’t failed us yet––Also the food. Don’t forget the food.”