Lili Zwart didn’t write Miracles on Bella Camila for me. It’s a young adult novel. I’m past 60. Still, the back cover says it “will appeal to readers young and old,” and some days I still think I’m 16. I read it as both of us.
The book opens in 2019. Gabe Chureste is 15, and his mother, Marie, a nurse, is dying of Morgellons disease, a skin condition that most doctors don’t recognize, according to the novel. The family has 11 acres of vines in Redwood Valley. Gabe’s Chilean great-grandfather Miguel won the land in a poker game, or so the family story goes.
The vineyard has gone to weeds. Gabe finds Miguel’s leather journal and holds it to his chest; gold leaves swirl, and he sees the vineyard as it once was. Then a real estate agent shows up with papers for Marie to sign. Gabe asks for six months to bring the place back.
The author, Lili Zwart, lives in Regina, Saskatchewan. Her publisher, Pete’s Press, is a hybrid publisher there, meaning the author pays a fee toward the cost of producing the book. Author Alice Kuipers wrote the back-cover blurb, and the acknowledgments credit her with evaluating the manuscript, too. The book came out Dec. 1, 2025, in paperback and ebook, Zwart told me. She’s writing a sequel, according to her publisher’s author page on Zwart.
The story follows four years on the vine’s calendar, from planting through harvest. If you live here, you’ll know the ground: the hospital in Ukiah, a campground at Lake Mendocino, a pot farm south of Calpella and a picnic at Navarro Beach.
Of vines and meditation
I write about wine, and the pages I believe most are the ones where Gabe has dirt on his hands. He takes on his great-grandfather’s abandoned acre one vine at a time, untangling each and tying it up. One afternoon Stuart, a Marine veteran of Afghanistan who rents an acre, turns up and works beside him without a word.
“Unwinding the vine patiently was its own form of meditation,” Zwart writes.
Nobody in this book is more honest than Stuart. “You just go ahead and do stuff without necessarily knowing how it all ends,” he tells Gabe. “That kind of living is pretty hopeful.”
Then there’s the community pruning day: veterans, Pomo families, high school kids piling out of a Hummer, the twin sons of an old Italian winemaking family. That’s Mendocino County, pretty much.
The warm center of the book is Annie Winowa, Gabe’s mother Marie’s best friend and a Pomo nurse. Pete, his sister Carmel and an elder named Gary bring Gabe into the Pomo community, and Gary tells him how Coyote Valley was flooded to make Lake Mendocino.
Zwart said she ran the Pomo passages by a member of the Redwood Valley Rancheria’s band council, who said they were fine but asked not to be named. The acknowledgments credit “Representatives of the Redwood Valley Rancheria (Little River Band of Pomo Indians)” with ensuring cultural accuracy.
On the page, though, I wanted more from those characters. Too often they’re there to help Gabe along, rather than getting enough room to become people in their own right.
The teenager in me went along with much of the rest: a palomino named Jimmy, a gray wolf that leads Gabe north into the Klamath Mountains, a bus to San Francisco to find the father who left, and a romance.
My older, more critical, self caught things. Gabe worries that “even if dollar bills magically fell from the sky, it would take three years to see a yield of grapes.” Then, more or less, the money does fall. There’s a $15,000 nursery credit from a great-uncle he’s never met, a life insurance payout, a tractor from the neighbor and a no-interest loan for a new cellar. Each rescue makes Gabe’s job a little easier, but it also takes some of the weight off the work.
The farming slips here and there, too. The book says green clusters on young vines “would turn red for harvest the next year.” Grapes color up the same summer they set. It also puts the Klamath region at “the northern tip of Redwood County.” There’s no Redwood County in California.
And sometimes the grown-ups lecture. Carmel gets described by her body too often.
But the book keeps finding its way back to the vineyard, and that’s where I kept finding my way back to it.
Marie is too weak to walk. She sits in a wheelchair beside her son and hands him ties from a bag on her lap. “They often look completely dead so I have to examine each one for live buds,” Gabe tells her.
Those are the moments when Miracles on Bella Camila doesn’t need quite so many miracles. Gabe has a row of neglected vines in front of him, his mother beside him and work that needs doing. He takes the next vine and begins.