After the Hurricane: A Novel
By Leah Franqui
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Named by Etaf Rum as one of the Best Beach Reads of All Time for "Read with Jenna!"
Reminiscent of Gabriela Garcia’s Of Women and Salt, Leah Franqui brings us an engrossing, deeply personal novel with a mystery at its heart as a daughter returns to Puerto Rico to search for her troubled father, who has gone missing after Hurricane Maria.
From the outside, Elena Vega’s life appears to be an easy one: the only child of two professional parents, private school, NYU. But her twenties are aimless and lacking in connection. Something has always been amiss in her life: her father, the brilliant but deeply troubled Santiago Vega.
Born in rural Puerto Rico, Santiago arrived in New York as a small child. His harsh, mercurial father returned to the island, leaving Santiago to be raised by his mentally ill mother and his formidable grandmother. An outstanding student, he followed scholarships to Stanford, then Yale Law, marrying Elena’s mother along the way. Santiago is the shining star of his migrant family—the one who made it out and struck it rich. But he is a haunted man, plagued by trauma, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. He’s lost contact with Elena over the years and returned to San Juan to wrestle his demons alone.
Then Hurricane Maria strikes, and Santiago vanishes. Desperate to know what happened to the father she once adored, Elena returns to Puerto Rico, a place she loved as a child but hasn’t seen in years. There she must unravel the truth about who her father is, crisscrossing the storm-swept island and reaching deep into his family tree to find relatives she’s never met, each of whom seems to possess a clue about Santiago’s fate.
A compelling mystery unfolds, as Elena is reunited with family, and with a place she loved and lost—the island of Puerto Rico, which is itself a character in this book. It’s a story of connection, migration, striving, love, and loss, illuminated by humor and affection, written by a novelist at the height of her gifts.
Leah Franqui
Leah Franqui is a graduate of Yale University and received an MFA at NYU-Tisch. She is a playwright and the recipient of the 2013 Goldberg Playwriting Award, and also wrote a web series for which she received the Alfred Sloan Foundation Screenwriting award (aftereverafterwebseries.com). A Puerto Rican-Jewish Philadelphia native, Franqui lives with her Kolkata-born husband in Mumbai. AMERICA FOR BEGINNERS is her first novel.
Read more from Leah Franqui
America for Beginners: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mother Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for After the Hurricane
6 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Elena Vega’s father has always been an elusive figure in her life as he battled mental illness and alcoholism and finally slipped back to Puerto Rico years ago after her parents' divorce. So when her mother calls her a few months after Hurricane Maria to say her father is missing on the island, she reacts with mixed emotions before heading there to search for him. Leah Franqui’s After The Hurricane combines Elena’s actual search with the pieces of history about her father that she uncovers along the way. Franqui gives the novel an interesting structure with a two-steps-forward three-steps-back kind of feeling, and at times the writing is emotional, funny, and beautifully descriptive of the island and Elena’s painful revelations. But, the story drags with too much internal musing and too many side characters that become confusing. All this made After The Hurricane a mixed bag for me — parts very enjoyable and parts a bit tedious —but in the end a solid novel about family history, Puerto Rico, and finding yourself.