With the deft touch of a novelist and the sharp eye of an anthropologist, Christine Eber tells a luminous, spiritually-charged tale of an indigenous Maya community adapting to the wrenching demands of the outside world.  When a Woman Rises is a jewel of a book—engaging, moving, tragic, and ultimately transporting.

– Peter Canby, senior editor, The New Yorker, author of Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya

Christine Eber has fulfilled her cargo with this exquisitely drawn and incandescent novel of the lives of women in the Mayan community of Chenalhó in Chiapas. Detailing the lives of friends Magdalena and Lucia, the novel builds slowly, resolutely, and powerfully toward a greater understanding of what it is to be a woman. That charge is to know the inexorable beauty and pain of being human. 

– Denise Chávez, author of The King and Queen of Comezón