The Distant Marvels

May 4, 2015
This resonant multi-generational family chronicle from Acevedo (Love and Ghost Letters) begins with Hurricane Flora, one of the strongest Atlantic storms on record. In September 1963, the hurricane approaches Cuba, forcing its populace to take shelter. Maria Sirena, an ailing 64-year-old widow finds refuge with seven other women inside Casa Velazquez, the mansion of the former governor of Santiago. Maria befriends Susana Soto, a 29-year-old breast cancer survivor who discovers that Maria was once a lectora at a cigar factory. To help pass the time, Susana persuades Maria to recount her eventful life history. The plot device of having her speak to a captive audience works effectively. Acevedo also makes judicious use of the historical material: Maria describes her parents' hardships as insurgents struggling to liberate Cuba from Spain. Mireya, Maria's estranged friend, denounces her lurid storytelling as something found in "a 10-cent novel." However, Maria, who has lost her son, thought to be in the U.S., and her daughter, who resides in Havana, feels compelled to relate her story in the face of skepticism. Her story takes a grim turn when she reveals her imprisonment in a Spanish concentration camp, where she became pregnant. The intervention of a U.S. journalist won Maria her freedom, but it came at a terrible price. As Hurricane Flora blows past Fidel Castro's new Cuba, Acevedo's heartbreaking and humane novel comes to a memorable conclusion.

Starred review from March 1, 2015
One woman's story of brutality, courage, tragedy, and love gets a roomful of Cuban refugees through a hurricane.As Hurricane Flora approaches Cuba in 1963, 82-year-old Maria Sirena Alonso refuses to evacuate with her neighbors; she is seriously ill and does not want to be saved. But once the storm arrives, a soldier shows up at her door to load her on a bus bound for a shelter. Though she takes nothing with her except a small framed photograph of a little boy, she needs nothing more because her whole life is in her head: "I have a perfect memory. I remember nearly everything I've ever read or heard." Once installed in a room at the erstwhile governor's mansion with a group of women who will ride out the storm together-including an ex-friend whose dead son used to be married to her daughter-Maria Sirena begins to tell the story of her life, beginning with her birth to Cuban parents on a Spanish ship at the end of the 19th century. Her rebel father is jailed as soon as they reach shore; her resourceful, beautiful mother, Lulu, finds protection for herself and her daughter with another man. When Agustin rejoins them, they are swept into the war against the Spanish. Acevedo's third novel (A Falling Star, 2014, etc.) mingles the recounting of Maria Sirena's epic family saga, which ends with a heartbreaking confession, with scenes among the women at the mansion. One woman decides to make a break for it: "It is Noraida, swimming in the debris-filled water, her brightly dyed hair like streamers in her wake. We watch as she pushes aside a plastic cup, a sheet of plywood, an umbrella floating upside down and bobbing along." Such irresistible moments of rebellion and bravery define this tale. Perfect timing for a Scheherazade-style account of Cuban history.

Starred review from March 1, 2015
Cuban American author Acevedo (Love and Ghost Letters, 2005) here makes a significant contribution to contemporary literature. The elderly Maria Sirena has lived through and, as a young girl, participated in the Cuban war for independence; now, in 1963, at the dawn of Castro's new Cuba, with Hurricane Flora on the way, she is evacuated with other women to a historic mansion being used as a shelter. A former cigar-factory lector (a reader-out-loud of fiction into which she surreptitiously weaves her own stories), Maria Sirena entertains her fellow refugees with personal and richly imagined stories that will remind delighted readers of everything from Chaucer to Garcia Marquez. Her life story and that of her mother, including their time spent with the insurgents and in a reconcentrado during the 1890s, becomes a stunning confession. This extraordinary narrative tells, from these women's perspectives, how war brings lovers together and tears families apart. This is a major, uniquely powerful, and startlingly beautiful novel that should bring Acevedo's name to the top echelon of this generation's writers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)