All the Crooked Saints

All the Crooked Saints is a novel by Maggie Stiefvater, published in 2017 and set in the Colorado desert, in the small town of Bicho Raro.

The Soria family can perform miracles, and the miracles are not necessarily kind: what the family can do is find the darkness in a person and make it visible, which draws pilgrims to the town in search of help and leaves many of them staying because they cannot finish what has been started. The story follows three cousins who each want the family's future to be different. Beatriz is the girl without feelings, who wants only to be left alone with her own thoughts. Daniel is the Saint of Bicho Raro, who performs miracles for everyone except himself. Joaquin spends his nights running an illegal radio station under an assumed name, broadcasting to a desert with few listeners. Around them are owls that behave as though they have been divinely troubled, a forbidden romance and the practicalities of a town in the middle of nowhere.

Stiefvater writes magical realism with a dry, affectionate narrator, and the book is as much about the cost of a miracle as about the miracle itself.