What happens to stories that are never told or left unfinished? In Julia Alvarez's new novel The Cemetery of Untold Stories, they get burned and buried.
In this creative book, Alma, an author, is retiring, but she has so many files of unfinished stories. So when she inherits a plot of land in her native Dominican Republic, she decides to turn it into a cemetery where she can literally bury the stories.
But some stories want to be told.
And so, the stories in her cemetery start talking, revealing themselves to the cemetery groundskeeper. And within those stories, answers are revealed. If only the author herself had listened long enough to find them out!
As we learn the stories of two of the author's characters (Bienvenida, the ex-wife of a cruel dictator, and Manuel Cruz, a Dominican doctor who escaped to the U.S.), we also learn the story of the groundskeeper, her sister, their cruel father, and their missing mother.
The biggest takeaway for me was that we need to tell our stories. Otherwise, how will anyone - our spouses, our children, other family members, our neighbors - ever know who we truly are? How will they ever understand us and what we came from if they don't know the past? This book would be a great book club read.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories is published by Algonquin and just had its publication date yesterday! You can find it wherever books are sold. I received a free review copy.
Comments
Post a Comment