| This modern, aristocratic book portrays real-life | | | | only draw to a bad conclusion... |
| events and how hard it is to deal with them, | | | | She marries her next-door neighbor and best friend, |
| overcome them, or even struggle with them. Such is | | | | Richard Laveaux, the son of a rich mulatto family, in |
| life, anywhere you put it, in the Caribbean or | | | | spite of her mother's protests. The marriage is happy |
| otherwise. Many people might have problems dealing | | | | at first, and Alicia enjoys working for the family |
| with the material in this book. But it's involving, | | | | business and raising their two children. But the |
| shocking, yet mellifluously elegant in its portrayal of a | | | | altogether too soon deaths of her father and her |
| wealthy woman's humble and downtrodden | | | | alcoholic husband raise questions in her mind about |
| existence. She cannot fathom the dark side of life, | | | | the sanity and purpose of her carefully kept |
| and in her pure yet misguided rebellion, she becomes | | | | upper-class existence. |
| a metaphoric symbol for humanity in general--not to | | | | Was she really meant to be happy, or is something |
| mention impoverished, yet mysteriously happy. | | | | else, a mysterious fate much darker and deeper, in |
| Professor Ardain Isma's excellent first novel | | | | store for her? |
| painstakingly describes the fact-based life story of | | | | Unable to cope with her problems, Alicia leaves Haiti |
| Alicia Maldonado, a young, aristrocratic white woman | | | | with her youngest child, Jean-Marie, and vanishes |
| born in Cuba to a land-owning family, members of a | | | | without a trace. None of her family or friends knows |
| seemingly elite class. Alicia arrives in Haiti with her | | | | her exact whereabouts, and a prolonged and heated |
| parents and older brother Mario after fleeing Cuba, | | | | search for her begins. How does it ever end? How |
| following the political turmoil within the Batista regime. | | | | long must she suffer, and what happens? |
| But what she discovers there is that, in its own way, | | | | You must find out, by reading this gripping, poignant |
| there is no such thing as fleeing. What her family left | | | | and sophisticatedly charming book--full of the flavor |
| behind had to catch up with her slowly, surely, like a | | | | of the islands, the richness of the soil, and the death |
| creeping plague of sophisticated reality that could | | | | of all meaning. |