Love and Ghost Letters: A Novel
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About this ebook
On the outside, Josefina Navarro's life seems fortunate enough—she lives with her father and her nursemaid, Regla, who raises her after the death of her mother in a luxurious home in Vedado, one of Cuba's wealthiest districts. She attends society dances and is courted by all of Havana's elite young bachelors. Enchanted by the rituals of her nursemaid, Josefina learns about the profound mysticism inherent in even the most mundane affairs. Though she is pampered, Josefina feels that her life is without passion or excitement. Her father, Sergeant Antonio Navarro, a Spaniard by birth, is a stern and demanding man whose past is a tightly kept secret.
When she meets and marries Lorenzo Concepción, a poor, reckless young man, the sergeant tells her, "So, you have chosen him…and you will be hungry and miserable all your life." The couple moves to El Cotorro, a poverty-stricken town that is far removed from the Vedado plazas and carefully tended gardens Josefina knew. Lorenzo begins to leave her for months at a time, "looking for work," but in reality, womanizing and carousing all over the island. Even after the birth of two healthy children, Josefina is not happy. This is not the life she had envisioned. During a political maelstrom, history brings the sergeant to El Cotorro to quell a riot, where he is attacked and presumed dead. But perception is reality on an island in which darkness and light commingle, and magic and truth are one in the same.
When Josefina begins receiving letters from her father, she believes that what she holds are heaven's missives, ghost letters. Through the letters, Josefina comes to know her father intimately, as a ghost and guardian, as he reveals the truth about his life. In the act of writing and reading, she has found a love to fill the empty places in her heart.
Set in Cuba and Miami, covering nearly fifty years of the island's history, LOVE AND GHOST LETTERS unfolds the lives of the Navarro-Concepción families in the patterns and permutations of memory, and conjures a Cuban setting that evokes mysticism and magic.
Chantel Acevedo
Chantel Acevedo was born in Miami to Cuban parents. She is the acclaimed author of the Muse Squad middle grade series, as well as several adult novels, including The Distant Marvels, which was a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and she is also a professor of English at the University of Miami, where she directs the MFA program. Chantel lives with her personal Muse Squad, aka her family, in Florida. You can visit her online at www.chantelacevedo.com.
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Reviews for Love and Ghost Letters
6 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/53.5*** Acevedo gives us a wonderful exploration of Cuba from 1933 to 1969, focusing on the life of Josefina, the only daughter of a police sergeant who lives a life of privilege until she meets and marries a poor dockhand, Lorenzo Concepcion. Josefina is strong-willed at times, and passive at others. She takes charge when defying her father, but acquiesces to the role her husband demands of her. Her steadfast champion is her old nursemaid, Regla, who offers advice and a charm or two to help the girl she raised and loved. At one point in the story, just about at the end of her rope, Josefina asks Regla for a specific spell. My F2F book club had quite the discussion about that episode, as we were fully expecting a different outcome. Over the course of the novel Acevedo explores love in all its many forms: passionate, chaste and unrequited, within marriage or outside of it, as a teenager, during old age, parental and among friends. The men come across as selfish idiots, the women are frequently long-suffering and passive. The upheaval within the relationships is contrasted nicely against the revolutions and political changes in the country during this time frame.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the story of Josefina Navarro and her family through 50 years in Cuba and Miami. Excellent insider look at a pre-Castro Cuba and then what it was like to live there during the revolution and after.