Summary and Reviews of A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens by Raul Palma

A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens by Raul Palma

A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens

A Novel

by Raul Palma
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Oct 3, 2023, 288 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 2024, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

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)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Bolivia's Cerro Rico and the Mining God El Tío

El Tio statue in Potosí with a cigarette in its mouth and colorful streamers on its headDuring 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,...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, try these:

  • The Reformatory jacket

    The Reformatory

    by Tananarive Due

    Published 2024

    About this book

    More by this author

    A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he's sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

  • Perish jacket

    Perish

    by LaToya Watkins

    Published 2023

    About this book

    More by this author

    From a stunning new voice, comes a powerful debut novel, Perish, about a Black Texan family, exploring the effects of inherited trauma and intergenerational violence as the family comes together to say goodbye to their matriarch on her deathbed.

Read-Alikes are one of the many benefits of membership. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    A Map to Paradise
    by Susan Meissner
    From the USA Today bestselling author of Only the Beautiful. 1956, Malibu, California: Something is not right on Paradise Circle.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Girl Falling
    by Hayley Scrivenor

    The USA Today bestselling author of Dirt Creek returns with a story of grief and truth.

  • Book Jacket

    Jane and Dan at the End of the World
    by Colleen Oakley

    Date Night meets Bel Canto in this hilarious tale.

  • Book Jacket

    The Antidote
    by Karen Russell

    A gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town.

Who Said...

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

T B S of T F

and be entered to win..