Welcome to Saint Angel — William Luvaas

Welcome to Saint Angel is a dead-serious comedy about development gone mad and a rural community's--sometimes lethal--battle to stop unscrupulous developers and drought deniers from turning their beloved high-desert home into a suburban nightmare. In the bucolic valley of Santa Rosa de Los Angeles (Saint Angel), townsfolk split into warring camps. Developers want to turn the valley into a sprawling bedroom community and appropriate its meager water supply to grow lawns in the desert. Al Sharpe and his allies want to preserve its natural beauty and rural charm. The battle between them is both comic and tragic. The story of one man's fight to save the place he loves and a rural community's struggle to preserve its way of life and tight-knit community, the novel speaks to the impact of unbridled development on the natural environment and on people's lives.
After his wife dies in a plane crash, iconoclastic inventor Al Sharpe moves to Saint Angel Valley in SoCal's high desert to rebuild his life on beloved "Second Chance Acres," building his young daughter a tree house in a giant oak tree and inventing the Sharpe Smoke Scrubber to detoxify wood smoke. When wealthy developer Ches Noonan constructs massive housing tracts and plunders the valley's precious water supply, Al and his scrappy friends fight back, halting development with their madcap high jinks and the help of local Indians, ancient demon Tahquitz, and Mother Nature.

"I've been shouting it for years, but now I'll shout it louder: William Luvaas, my friends, is a wild-eyed genius."
-Lauren Groff, National Book Award Finalist


"The sheer scope of the author's imagination, and the almost impossibly delicate poetic weight of his prose, has made the discovery of William Luvaas' writing one of the genuine joys of my reading-year.  He is a remarkable writer, comfortably among the finest at work in America today."
-Billy O'Callaghan,Irish Book Award-Winning Author