What happens when an upper middle-class but politically unsophisticated young mother leaves the mental health care home where she has lived for four years and travels from West Vancouver to the small, fictional Central American country of Ixcheltlán to rescue her eleven-year-old daughter from a vague danger identified by the child who is in the care of her father? Because Sara Bowley’s spouse has taken control of all her finances and doesn’t want her to leave the care home, she has to take the Greyhound to San Diego, ride chicken buses, and hitchhike through Mexico and Guatemala in search of her child.

Magnificat: Song of Justice, is a story of two women on separate paths, one a North American woman’s journey to social consciousness, and on the other, a tale of a campesina named Maria Luz who seeks to lead her people to an alternative to the war that is devastating her country. When these two paths converge, Sara comes to believe in the wisdom of the campesina, and embraces a radical change in her life, but the shadow of death soon descends on them both, threatening to destroy all that they have set out to accomplish.

Magnificat: Song of Justice is based on the author’s interest in the concept of a female Christ figure in the context of liberation theology, and her post-war volunteerism in El Salvador in the 1980s.