| This modern, aristocratic book portrays | | | | |
| real-life events and how hard it is to deal | | | | She marries her next-door neighbor and best |
| with them, overcome them, or even struggle | | | | friend, 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 people | | | | protests. The marriage is happy at first, and |
| might have problems dealing with the material | | | | Alicia 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 of | | | | altogether too soon deaths of her father and |
| a wealthy woman's humble and downtrodden | | | | her alcoholic husband raise questions in her |
| existence. She cannot fathom the dark side of | | | | mind about the sanity and purpose of her |
| life, and in her pure yet misguided | | | | carefully kept upper-class existence. |
| rebellion, she becomes a metaphoric symbol | | | | |
| for humanity in general--not to mention | | | | Was 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 life | | | | Unable 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 a | | | | Jean-Marie, and vanishes without a trace. |
| land-owning family, members of a seemingly | | | | None of her family or friends knows her exact |
| elite class. Alicia arrives in Haiti with her | | | | whereabouts, and a prolonged and heated |
| parents and older brother Mario after fleeing | | | | search for her begins. How does it ever end? |
| Cuba, following the political turmoil within | | | | How long must she suffer, and what happens? |
| the Batista regime. But what she discovers | | | | |
| there is that, in its own way, there is no | | | | You must find out, by reading this gripping, |
| such thing as fleeing. What her family left | | | | poignant 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 of | | | | richness of the soil, and the death of all |
| sophisticated reality that could only draw to | | | | meaning. |
| a bad conclusion... | | | | |