I found this novel to be unconventional yet magical in very many ways. As it is this author’s forte, the storytelling is exquisite, and while reading the book, I was never bored.

The book tells an intense story about messed-up relationships as its main subject. Within this story’s family, the father and mother are anthropologists who cannot get adequate funding for their expeditions. When their church wants to send a spiritual advisor to Central America, to the Sierra Madres where the about-to-be-extinct El Mundo tribe is, the father acting as some kind of a minister manages to have the church send him and his wife Langley and daughters Magdalena and Susannah there. The family spends many years among the Mundo Indians.

Magdalena is a spirited child and she grows up to be a spirited young person who does what she wishes to do. Susannah, on the other hand, is easygoing as her father’s pet. During their teenage years, Magdalena makes friends and later falls in love with a Mundo boy named Manuelito.

When the fifteen-year-old Magdalena’s sexual relationship with Manuelito is discovered, her father beats her. His act is the inciting event that leads the way to the destruction of the relationships among all members and between one another. After this point, the plot revolves around several settings as to different places, while it deals with themes such as sexuality, love, lesbianism, jealousy, obesity, grief, and remorse.

The first chapter opens with the dead father looking down at Susannah having sex with Pauline, her partner. This may shock some readers as, like this one, most of the sexual scenes are explicit in the novel, but they do carry their own weight by making the story more comprehensible and real for the readers.

Yet, it is not only the dead father looking down from the other side and speaking in this novel. Just about everyone and anyone who has a say gets a chapter or two or several, either from the beyond or from the earthly realm. Even Irene, an elderly Greek Dwarf who is a less important character to the main story, gets her chapters. This may be because the author’s agenda is to show the universal status of women in most societies.

No matter who grabs the point of view in the telling of this story, the two main characters are Magdalena and Susannah, and their relationships with each other and with other people who come into their lives.

What went unheeded throughout the book was the anthropological findings or the expedition that started the ball rolling. Although the expedition was the reason for the family’s moving to the Sierra Madres where the El Mundo was, no book or papers were shown at the end, which made me wonder about, as if the idea of the expedition was just an excuse to start a story.

Still, people talking from the beyond has been both a shock and a delight to me as I found the essence of the story to be quite serious. This strategy by the author has given more of a conclusion to the characters’ lives that leads to redemption as they look back and mull over where they went wrong. It also grants some kind of a timelessness to the story as well as pointing out the need for the empowerment of women.

reading for themes rather than the characters or the plot.

is Alice Walker (b. 1944) who, according to Amazon, is one of the United States’ preeminent writers and an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. In 1983, Walker became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. In her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.

the story moves well and is interesting, and it is a different kind of a story that mainly dwells on its themes.

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Created May 31, 2020 at 5:45pm • Submit your own review...