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Book Reviewed by:A lush and lyrical debut novel about a Costa Rican family wrestling with a deadly secret, from rising literary star John Manuel Arias
Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company's most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde's family is changed forever.
Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family's rupture, steeped in machismo, jealousy, labor uprisings, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantations in Central America.
Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There
Was Fire.
Teresa, Barrio Ávila, 1968
Some still talk about how hot that night was. Old women whisper it over coffee, their just-as-old husbands debating over checkers outside. Even a tow truck driver named Luis, born that night, has been told about the malignancy of the heat. Its teeth. He says if his mother hadn't known any better, she would have sworn she'd just given birth to the Antichrist.
That Friday was good until it wasn't. Crucifixion reenactors drank clandestinely in bars, pyretic palmers unlocked their knees to scuttle home. Time wasn't tallied, because the priests who normally manned the belfries lay naked inside the darkness of their churches, praying for the heat to pass. No singing bells to interrupt the hours. At dusk, it felt as if a second sun had risen—a sugar-white impostor with no warmth to its light. The full moon climbed center-sky, its body no longer a mirror but a magnifying glass focusing its beams on San José's valley. It cast long ...
Though a man lights the match that ignites the plot, the book succeeds on the strength, folly, desperation, and hope of the Cepeda Valverde women. Teresa's longing for a reconciliation with Lyra, a relationship with her grandson, and some way of making sense of her mother's murder are rendered with delicate and anguished precision. Lyra is perhaps the most stable member of the family, but her anger toward Teresa for her neglectful behavior after the events of 1968 and her grief for Carmen burn incandescent. In the 1995 timeline, Barrio Ávila is a hollowed out shell of its former self, the abandoned train on the defunct railroad tracks a symbol of emptiness left behind after the destruction of the corporate leviathan that birthed it...continued
Full Review
(794 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
In Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and elsewhere in Central America and the West Indies.
UFC was born in 1899 when the Boston Fruit Company merged with the Central American banana companies of businessman Minor C. Keith, who owned a railroad system in the region (in the novel, the American Fruit Company was founded by a "distant cousin" of Keith's). By 1930, UFC employed more people in Central America than any other ...
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