NOW THEN

Two women reckon with love and history in this debut novel by NBC news anchor Radford.

Liliana Soto Walker never intended to leave her hometown of Elk River, North Carolina, to go to college: “My aging parents, despite their pride and independence, were not cut out for this life alone. Mountain life is quiet and hard, physical and consuming. It’s not meant to be lived in isolation.” But her mother, Marisol, convinced her to apply to Harvard, where she was accepted, and Lily, with Cuban and Black American heritage, finds herself thrust into an unfamiliar world in September 1991. She makes friends, including her roommate, Hana Kang, from Seoul by way of Los Angeles, and Vikram Desai, a handsome graduate student on whom she develops a near-instant crush. As we follow 10 years of Lily’s life, with Vikram disappearing and reappearing, her story is interspersed with Marisol’s memories of her own young adulthood in Cuba in the 1950s, where she became involved with real-life revolutionary José Antonio Echeverría, and was imprisoned, repeatedly raped, and became pregnant with a boy she gave up in order to escape jail and flee to the U.S. Weaving two major threads together is challenging, and unfortunately, Radford is unable to do so nimbly here—the book reads like two novels inelegantly smashed together, and when the plots converge, it feels forced, with an ending that’s hard to believe. The will-they, won’t-they relationship between Lily and Vikram isn’t compelling; it’s never quite clear what Lily sees in him. The dialogue isn’t bad, if overly expository at times, and Radford does write with heart—but not enough to sustain this well-intentioned but ultimately clumsy novel.

A book that never manages to connect.