An absorbing and complex novel shines a light on chattel slavery in Puerto Rico.
An enslaved woman finds that human bonds sustain her even amid the cruelties of plantation life.
As a teenager in the early 19th century, Keera is kidnapped from her home in Yorubaland by slave traders. She is sold to the owner of Hacienda Paraiso, a plantation in Puerto Rico. He makes dual use of the women he enslaves: They work the sugar cane fields, and they are kept almost constantly pregnant, their babies taken away and sold right after birth. The novel opens with Keera, renamed Pola, making a desperate escape attempt after years of loss drive her close to madness. She ends up on Hacienda Las Mercedes, another sugar cane plantation but one with somewhat more humane owners—Pola is astonished to see enslaved children living there with their families. She’s been savagely beaten and gang-raped, but she recovers under the care of Rufina, a curandera, and two other older women who, although they are enslaved, have a degree of autonomy because of their talents for curing, cooking, and directing the plantation’s workshop that produces lucrative fine needlework and dresses. When she’s well, she becomes a protégé of all three, assisting Rufina in her healing arts, learning to cook in Pastora’s fine kitchen, and serving as a cutter and helper to Tia Josefa’s needleworkers. Llanos-Figueroa draws a detailed picture of social hierarchy on the plantation, not just that of owners and the enslaved, but the status system among the workers, based on the kind of work they do, which is in turn based on colorism—darker-skinned people are assigned to the grueling tasks like cutting cane, while the lighter-skinned (often mixed race) people work in the big house, serving tea and sewing ball gowns. Pola, who is dark, becomes an exception to the rule and the object of resentment. She also becomes the object of desire of a strong, stoic worker named Simon, but her hatred of men stands between them. Her heart does warm for Chachita, an orphan girl she finds living on her own in the woods. Chachita fills the empty spot in Pola’s heart left by her stolen babies, but helping the child puts them both at risk. Llanos-Figueroa’s prose is lively, her characters vivid. The last part of the book loses steam when it shifts into romance mode, but it’s a moving and engaging tale.
An absorbing and complex novel shines a light on chattel slavery in Puerto Rico.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-306222-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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