FELLA
an American fable
Lost in the frontier of the American West, a defiant girl infested with angels finds an unlikely protector in a jaded, debt-laden deadeye.
In the limping aftermath of the American Civil War, a girl who names herself Tate is raised from infancy by the Sisters at Our Lady of Crossroads in the Dakota territory. Tate’s adolescence brings her a strange photosensitivity, and a staggering aptitude for music surely given to her by heaven. The Sisters declare her blessed, and destined to play music for visiting pilgrims.
After surviving a harrowing fever, a teenaged Tate strikes out from the convent. She seeks her own path on a train bound to Chicago in the dead of night, but her plans are scattered by a violent robbery that leaves Tate lost and wandering the wastes of West Texas. When she discovers the boomtown of Perrieville lodged in the desert, the enigmatic, morose posse leader Mr. Midden becomes her only trusted associate.
The girl ingrains herself with this strange oasis of urban comfort and the people who make it run—the community-minded priest Father Madero; the robber baron Mr. Perrie and his alluring daughter, Frederica; the unignorable friction between worker and owner class, already sparked to a dangerous pitch by a nearby cobalt mining operation—while the villa on the hill at the center of town tempts Tate with worldly knowledge she has only just begun to crave.
Shot through with tales of the Southwestern American frontier and its many-footed legends in a new construction, FELLA picks incisively at the flesh of an ailing nation frantic to rebuild itself in the image of its own mythos, come hell or high water.
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