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A Novel
by Raul Palma
Book Reviewed by:A genre-bending debut with a fiercely political heart, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores the weight of the devil's bargain, following the lengths one man will go to for the promise of freedom.
Hugo Contreras's world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo's debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo.
One day, Hugo's nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo's debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there's one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn't believe in spirits.
Hugo plans to do what he's done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo's old tricks don't work. Memories of his past—his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy—collide with Alexi's demons in an explosive climax.
Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores questions of visibility, migration, and what we owe—to ourselves, our families, and our histories.
Excerpt
A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
IT WAS CHRISTMASTIME in Miami, and Hugo hadn't been sleeping well because every time he tried, he'd feel his indebtedness drop into bed with him, this invisible thing. Sometimes it would take hold of his hand, kiss him, then wrap itself around his chest so that it hurt to breathe, or it would slap him awake and demand attention. It was impossible to sleep. It was impossible to imagine a future.
He lived in an efficiency. When he sat at his table drinking tea, he could hear the murmur of another family through the drywall. The children whined, laughed, dribbled basketballs. Their noises made him feel like he lived in a real home. From his window, he'd watch them—all in school uniforms—march across the street at 7:05 a.m. to catch the school bus. He'd wanted to be a father.
But Meli was dead, and even if she were still alive and he'd managed to be a better husband, they'd always been broke and in want of what they could not afford. ...
Hugo's individual story holds sufficient depth to feel complete unto itself. It would be easy for a reader to get lost in it alone, to forget that the setup of A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens practically promises a thrilling horror adventure. When it eventually delivers on this promise, it does so without seeming overstuffed or losing the thread of Hugo's character arc. His double-pronged problem of feeling both responsible and wronged is an issue inherent in a society where exploitation is the norm, where the philosophy required to justify this norm takes as much — possibly more — magical thinking to maintain as the superstitions that Hugo shuns but that even he understands serve a purpose. Palma's novel is an incisive social critique, a devastating portrait of self-sabotage, and a wild ride into the unknown that is still somehow oddly comforting in its inevitability...continued
Full Review
(762 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban and the forthcoming Vanishing Maps
Raul Palma's novel, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, offers us hilarity and heartbreak in equal measure. With lush prose and an unerring eye, Palma chronicles the substrata of Miami—the human costs of immigration, poverty, debt, discrimination, and, yes, ghosts—beneath the city's breezy, tropical surface. A pitch-perfect debut. Ernesto Quiñonez, author of Bodega Dreams
In this Faustian hell of a debut, the prose ripples with a mythical rhythm. Raul Palma has taken a splash of Oscar Hijuelos' musical cadence, a dash of Alejo Carpentier's magic realism, and along with his own considerable power to depict Miami lore, its humanism, its African rituals, its mysterious legends, its strong coffee—the end result is this suspenseful, stylistic, and sensory classic.
During the height of the Spanish colonization of Latin America in the 16th and early 17th centuries, conquistadors forced enslaved workers to extract vast amounts of silver from mines in Cerro Rico ("rich hill" in Spanish) near the city of Potosí (in what is now Bolivia), which once held the largest silver deposits on Earth. As many as eight million enslaved Quechan and African people died there. According to the Guardian, Cerro Rico "bankrolled Spain's colonial empire, the Spanish Armada and the European Renaissance." And it wasn't just that it provided currency; it created it. Author Jack Weatherford observes that Potosí was "the first city of capitalism … for it supplied the primary ingredient of capitalism – money,...
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