A sweeping and touching debut about love, generational trauma, and complex mother-daughter relationships.
Tragedy shapes and reshapes the lives of a mother and daughter living in Puerto Rico.
Spanning decades, Díaz’s moving debut novel follows Maricarmen, a young working-class woman, as she grows up, falls in love, becomes a mother, and faces tragedy after tragedy in el Caserío, a close-knit barrio in Puerto Rico. Living with her controlling mother and beloved sister in one of the barrio’s only white families, Maricarmen is the model daughter until she turns 17 and falls in love with Rey el Cantante, a Black boy from the neighborhood. When her prejudiced mother discovers their relationship, she kicks her out. As Maricarmen deals with a surprise pregnancy and becomes the matriarch of her new family, Rey wears many hats: talented musician, loyal friend, drug addict, vigilante, father, husband, fugitive. He’s beloved for always finding ways to take care of his neighborhood even though his methods are morally gray. Meanwhile, Maricarmen takes care of their infant daughter, Nena, and Rey’s 3-year-old brother, Tito, while also waiting for Rey to resurface only for him to disappear again. Fifteen years later, when another shocking act of violence upends their lives, Maricarmen and Nena struggle not to let their grief swallow them whole. As Nena comes to terms with her sexual identity and her place in the barrio, Maricarmen makes a decision that changes their relationship forever. Set against the background of the AIDS epidemic, the novel explores queerness, cultural homophobia, and interpersonal and political violence with heartbreaking accuracy. There’s a particularly poignant moment when Nena, surrounded by her queer found family, hears one of her father’s favorite songs: “Nena imagined that it had reminded him that he was beautiful, that to look out at the world and see Black people looking back at him was to understand what real beauty was.” Díaz writes beautifully about grief, identity, addiction, family, and the blurry line between myth, truth, and history.
A sweeping and touching debut about love, generational trauma, and complex mother-daughter relationships.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781616209148
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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