Description
Great American novelist Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, returns with a luminescent novel about storytelling that reads like an instant classic.
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.
Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas and soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma’s characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo’s abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.
My Thoughts
This was a lovely palate cleanser for me between some historical romance and YA fantasy, but Julia Alvarez is so much more than a little lemon ice. The concept here may not be for everyone, but I loved the beginning of this set of stories that focus on Alma and her struggle with her father’s death and her place in the world.
A successful author, she finds her office full of unfinished stories which she feels the compulsion to bury. She regrets all the lost stories from her family, and wants to control her own unfinished and potentially lost stories by burying them where she began – in the Dominican Republic.
Alvarez explores the intricate family relationships that occur between Alma and her sisters, her parents, and even with the land in the Dominican Republic. The stories are complex and sometimes meandering, which requires attentive reading. This would make a thoughtful book club selection with discussion focusing on our own untold stories. What draws everything together is Alvarez’ beautiful prose. One of the best of the year.
Recommended.
“Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing . . . Lively, joyous . . . often witty, occasionally somber and elegiac.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, The New York Times Book Review
“Engaging and written in a playful, crystal-clear prose, this novel explores friendship, love, sisterhood, living between cultures, and how people can be haunted by the things they don’t finish . . . Entertaining . . . Heartwarming.” —Gabino Iglesias, The Boston Globe
**Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, Washington Post, Today.com, Goodreads, B&N Reads, Literary Hub, HipLatina, BookPage, BBC.com, Zibby Mag, and more**
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Published By: Algonquin Books
Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy
It's All About the Book 