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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.
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
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(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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