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Review of "Alicia Maldonado: A Mother Lost" by Ardain Isma

This modern, aristocratic book portrays
real-life events and how hard it is to dealShe marries her next-door neighbor and best
with them, overcome them, or even strugglefriend, Richard Laveaux, the son of a rich
with them. Such is life, anywhere you put it,mulatto family, in spite of her mother's
in the Caribbean or otherwise. Many peopleprotests. The marriage is happy at first, and
might have problems dealing with the materialAlicia enjoys working for the family business
in this book. But it's involving, shocking,and raising their two children. But the
yet mellifluously elegant in its portrayal ofaltogether too soon deaths of her father and
a wealthy woman's humble and downtroddenher alcoholic husband raise questions in her
existence. She cannot fathom the dark side ofmind about the sanity and purpose of her
life, and in her pure yet misguidedcarefully  kept  upper-class  existence.
rebellion, she becomes a metaphoric symbol
for humanity in general--not to mentionWas she really meant to be happy, or is
impoverished,  yet  mysteriously  happy.something else, a mysterious fate much darker
and  deeper,  in  store  for  her?
Professor Ardain Isma's excellent first novel
painstakingly describes the fact-based lifeUnable to cope with her problems, Alicia
story of Alicia Maldonado, a young,leaves Haiti with her youngest child,
aristrocratic white woman born in Cuba to aJean-Marie, and vanishes without a trace.
land-owning family, members of a seeminglyNone of her family or friends knows her exact
elite class. Alicia arrives in Haiti with herwhereabouts, and a prolonged and heated
parents and older brother Mario after fleeingsearch for her begins. How does it ever end?
Cuba, following the political turmoil withinHow  long  must she suffer, and what happens?
the Batista regime. But what she discovers
there is that, in its own way, there is noYou must find out, by reading this gripping,
such thing as fleeing. What her family leftpoignant and sophisticatedly charming
behind had to catch up with her slowly,book--full of the flavor of the islands, the
surely, like a creeping plague ofrichness of the soil, and the death of all
sophisticated reality that could only draw tomeaning.
a  bad  conclusion...



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