Afterlife

January 13, 2020
Alvarez’s poignant return to adult fiction (after the young adult Tia Lola series) raises powerful questions about the care people owe themselves and others. Antonia Vega is reeling from the sudden death of her husband, Sam, who suffered an aneurysm on the day they’d planned to celebrate her retirement. As an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Antonia is determined to embrace American values of self-preservation and independence, and she keeps a running dialogue in her head with Sam about the U.S. and D.R.’s conflicting values (“We live in America, she reminds the disapproving Sam in her head, where you put your oxygen mask on first”). This outlook is challenged after she finds an undocumented and pregnant teenage girl from Mexico hiding in her garage, and when Antonia’s charismatic but unstable older sister Izzy disappears. As Antonia weighs the needs of others and her own, memories of Sam’s magnanimity and generosity of spirit guide her, along with sentiments from authors such as Tolstoy (“What is the right thing to do?”) and Rilke (“You must change your life”). Alvarez blends light humor with deep empathy toward her characters, offering a convincing portrait of an older woman’s self discovery. This will satisfy her fans and earn new ones.

Alma Cuervo's warm, even-keeled performance guides listeners through the interwoven themes of love, loss, and compassion in this beautifully wrought new novel by poet and author Julia Alvarez. Antonia is a Vermonter of Dominican heritage. Since the recent death of her beloved husband, she has been "walking a narrow path through the loss" of love and identity--for Sam died on the day that Antonia retired from her job as an English professor. In the midst of her fragile calm, an illegal worker on the neighboring farm asks for her help, and a crisis erupts among her three siblings--the Dominican "sisterhood." Cuervo reads with nuance, highlighting different personalities without overdramatizing and enabling listeners to savor Alvarez's memorable writing. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine