- Name – The Cemetery of Untold Stories
- Author – Julia Alvarez
- Publication Date – April 2nd, 2024
- Publisher -Algonquin Books
Book Synopsis
Literary icon Julia Alvarez returns with an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling itself that will be an instant classic.
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.
Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma’s characters unspool their secret tales. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.
Readers of Isabel Allende’s Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez’s extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity that reminds us the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.
Review
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez is my first book by the author, which is a mix of historical fiction, magical realism, and books about books. I loved the writing, and I loved the characters as well. This one is mainly a plot-driven book. The book is about finding yourself and others through the art of storytelling and much more.
The concept of the book sounds very promising and is surely put out well through the book. I loved our narrator of the book, Alma Cruz, who is set to write a story in her small town in the Dominican Republic, where she inherits a plot of her homeland. The characters speak behind her back in the cemetery, but all she wants is for them to rest in peace.
The book does feel like it was a bit stretched to me. But overall, it was very well executed, and I loved the magical realism aspect added to this unique and whimsical plot in a cemetery setting. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.
Definitely pick this up if you are up for a unique and thought-provoking story that is different from your everyday reading. This one is surely going to stay with you even after you have finished reading it. A slice-of-life book in the most beautiful and intriguing way possible.
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AVANI SHAH 