The Air You Breathe

March 15, 2018

Having hooked readers with her award-winning debut, The Seamstress, Peebles returns with a story set in her native Brazil. In the 1930s, two girls--have-it-all Graça, the daughter of a wealthy sugar baron, and orphaned kitchen maid Dores--bond over a love of music and end up traveling together to Rio de Janeiro and finally Golden Age Hollywood in a quest for stardom. Big in-house excitement.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2018
Samba music and its allure beats beneath this winding and sinuous tale of ambition, memory, and identity.The long road to musical stardom followed by the privileged Graça, a Brazilian woman from a wealthy family with stakes in the brutal sugar-cane industry, runs parallel to that taken by her childhood friend and rival, Dores, the child of a promiscuous local woman who was taken in at birth by the plantation's cook. Peebles (The Seamstress, 2008) traces the girls' growing attachment to each other--despite divisive class distinctions in early-20th-century Brazil--and their growing enchantment with the samba style of music they first heard on the plantation before their joint escape. Their extended sojourn in the gritty and hedonistic Lapa neighborhood of Rio exposes the girls to privations and degradations but also allows them to enter the world of music they both yearn to conquer. Differences in talent and temperament strain their relationship, but shared ambition propels them toward unlikely levels of fame and notoriety as Graça transforms into Sofia Salvador, an international samba star (whose life experiences may echo those of Carmen Miranda). Alliances, romances, and friendships made by the women over the courses of their lives shift and reform as the girls from the plantation pursue pop stardom. Questions of loyalty to family, culture, and self are not always resolved in a comfortable fashion, and the scarifying price for achieving one's dreams runs far beyond the girls' childhood imaginations. From the perspective of old age, Dores' recounting of the duo's experiences is steeped in melancholy but also alludes to the unreliability of memory (and the necessity of forgetting in order to survive).Peebles' detailed and atmospheric story is cinematic in scope, panoramic in view, and lyrical in tone.

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June 25, 2018
Peebles (The Seamstress) presents a captivating if occasionally overstuffed portrait of friendship. Both born in Brazil in 1920, Dores and Graca are from different stations and have different gifts: Dores is an intensely intelligent and ambitious orphan who works as a servant on a sugar plantation; Graca is the plantation owner’s charismatic and beautiful daughter, who has a remarkable singing voice. After forming a bond over music, the two girls begin to write samba songs together and form a successful partnership. But their relationship is fraught with jealousy and frustration and eventually fractures. The book is narrated from the present day, with Dores’s recollections conveying the increasingly complex nature of the friendship as they pursued fame: codependency, mutual envy, their love for the same man, and (eventually) the revelation of Dores’ unrequited love for Graca. This structure allows for a wealth of detail, but the action often slows to a plodding pace, and Peebles is prone to prosaic explanations of the characters’ evolving relationship. Despite this, Dores’s reflections on love, music, envy, and loyalty ache with feeling, and a hint of mystery surrounding the central relationship’s dissolution will keeps readers intrigued until the end.

July 1, 2018
Dores and Gra�a grow up together on a sugar plantation in Brazil. Dores is a kitchen girl, and Gra�a is the pampered daughter of the house, but they are bound together by music. Many years later, Dores looks back over the path their love of music took them on, from the cane fields to 1940s Hollywood. Dreaming of singing careers, they run away to the Lapa District of Rio, where they eventually become part of a samba group called Sofia Salvador and the Blue Moon Band. Gra�a, the more talented singer, is Sofia Salvador; Dores writes the songs, along with band leader Vinicius, and also acts as general manager. Success in Rio is their ticket to Hollywood and a string of movie musicals. Sofia finds fame as the Brazilian Bombshell, but success comes at a cost. De Pontes Peebles (The Seamstress, 2008) does a marvelous job of evoking the world of samba, which forms the backdrop to the complicated relationship the two women share. Readers who are not daunted by the novel's length will be rewarded with complex characters and a well-realized setting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)