After a massive campaign to locate the children’s family turned up no clues, the children’s provenance was written off as an unsolvable mystery, and they were separated and raised by different families. But throughout the years, David, Taina, Holly, Raymond, and Adrian still consider themselves siblings, their connection reflected as adults in matching starfish tattoos.
This provocative construct for Sandra Rodriguez Barron’s new novel, “Stay With Me,’’ sets up an engaging examination of family ties and identity, laced with suspense, intrigue, and romance. The main story begins 35 years after the children were found, when David is diagnosed with brain cancer and told that he has a limited time to live. As his disease begins impacting brain function, David starts having brief flashbacks and disjointed memories from his early childhood. In confronting his own mortality, he becomes determined to figure out what exactly happened all those years ago.
Though David has long suspected he and his siblings are not related genetically, the five have never dug deeply into their background, preferring to keep alive the possibility of genetic connection. However, David believes, “The bonds formed from love and shared experiences are so much more powerful than shared genes. After all, we all know the world is full of blood relatives who can’t stand each other. I firmly believe that we are bound first and foremost by a deep understanding of each other. It’s all going to melt into one great alloy, then fuse into a whole that’s stronger than its divisive parts.’’
David devises a plan to get all his siblings together for a long-overdue family reunion, aided in his quest by his disenfranchised girlfriend Julia, who hasn’t the heart to break up with him in his condition. Julia’s family loans David and his siblings their beloved island home off the coast of Connecticut for a 10-day vacation, and Julia goes along as caretaker of both the house and David. What begins as revelry and celebration slowly starts to expose old wounds, forbidden attractions, jealousy. But amidst the shifting dynamics, the truth about the siblings’ mysterious childhood starts to come to light and deeper personal insights emerge.
Barron beautifully paces this compelling novel, bounding back and forth in time, slowly unveiling little revelations along the way. Her writing is direct, unfussy, leavened with wry humor and one hilarious scene in which David, never to experience the joys of fatherhood, shows Holly’s children how to fire exploding tampons. And there is the occasional poetic flash of searing emotional power, as when David addresses his siblings. “There are people who live their whole lives without ever experiencing the feeling of being at the right place at the right time, of just standing at the center of your own life. I feel that way now; and I want to thank you for showing up here, in this moment.’’ May we all have that moment.
Karen Campbell, a freelance writer based in Brookline, can be reached at Karencampbell4@rcn.com.
By Irasema Romero | 03/15/2011 - 09:45 |
During our lifetime, we are constantly asking ourselves: Who are we, really?
That is what author Sandra Rodriguez Barron seeks to answer in Stay With Me(Harper Paperbacks; $15, out now) through the lives of five siblings, who as toddlers were found together inside the cabin of a luxury boat after a devastating hurricane hit Puerto Rico’s western coast in 1979. They are left without a trace of their personal history or any link to their past lives.
But even after different families adopt David, Taina, Holly, Raymond and Adrian, they grow up as siblings, with a five-star tattoo inked on each to represent their bond.
When David is diagnosed with brain cancer and begins to have flashbacks that give them clues of life before the hurricane, they wrestle with the opportunity to search for their true identities. “The characters in this book are forced to define what family is; to look at how important blood is,” Rodriguez Barron tells us.
Before writing Stay with Me, the author had been contemplating the idea of adopting a child from an orphanage in El Salvador, where she had lived part of her life. “I was interested in this idea of the children who are given an opportunity out of this very difficult circumstance.”
Rodriguez Barron knows difficult circumstances. She lost her 64-year-old father Juan Rodriguez to brain cancer in 2006. Since then, the 43-year-old author became interested in the effects of the disease, which also took the life of a close friend. In exploring David’s battle with cancer, Rodriguez Barron decided to allow his character to speak to the reader in the present, while the rest of the book is written in past tense through the prism of a narrator. “He has a different sense of time. He only has the here and now,” Rodriguez Barron says of David’s terminal illness. “[The others] can tell the story recalling it because you presume they’ve moved into the future.”
Through this sense of urgency, David helps those nearest to him, including his girlfriend Julia, find something that completes each of them. For Benjamin, it’s overcoming a substance addiction, while Taina has to break her inhibitions in order to tap into her own creativity. Holly alludes to the author’s personal struggle in deciding to adopt the girl she always wanted. And for Julia and Adrian, an up-and-coming musician, it’s finding true love—with each other.
“She knows she doesn’t have a future with David,” says the author about the relationship between David and Julia, who stays to offer moral support through the cancer treatment. “They do love and care for each other. And through that process Julia allows herself to fall in love.”
Set partly in Connecticut, the book speaks to Rodriguez Barron’s own search for identity after spending most of her grown-up life in Connecticut, and being one of two Latinas in her high school.
“I wanted to write about that kind of disconnect that you feel if you couldn’t live in a Latino city,” said the author.
As part of his quest for answers, David invites his siblings for a vacation at Julia’s family home in Griswold Island off the coast of Connecticut. In the sibling’s time together on the island, Rodriguez Barron shows us how sometimes we don’t want to know the truth if it means losing what we value the most.
“You don’t have to be limited by nature,” says the author of the relationships we witness in Stay with Me. “Bonds are created by experience. “
And with this book, Rodriguez Barron accomplishes just that – creating a book that not only draws readers in, but also shares emotions that feel genuine based on the fact that they come from her own experiences.
The Heiress of Water:
From The Miami Herald
``Alma Borrero Winters believed that everything in life begins and ends with the ocean.'' With this evocative sentence, Sandra Rodriguez Barron, born in Puerto Rico and raised in Connecticut and El Salvador, sets up her debut novel, an engaging opera prima about sea shells and their power in the resurrection of two women from different times and places. Alma, a marine scientist and shell collector, is the mother of Monica Winters, the appealing character at the center of the story. Alma's disappearance and presumed death in El Salvador during that country's civil war had left her 12-year-old daughter -- now an adult physical therapist who soothes patients with ''magic hands'' -- with a spiritual void, a yearning and a burden. Monica's father, Bruce, never wanted to talk about his wife or the activities that had led to her disappearance. Their marriage was as split as the ``two halves of a bivalve.'' The other woman who figures in the story is Yvette Lucero, who has been in a coma for 23 months. Trapped inside a motionless body, she still speaks loudly and provides one of the book's most compelling characters -- especially since Monica is falling for her handsome husband, Will. When Yvette's mother whisks Yvette from her hospital bed in New Haven, Conn., and flies her to El Salvador to seek the legendary curative powers of a venomous and rare sea shell, Monica, now 27, follows. On this trip, Monica will find what she had been searching for so many years -- herself. With plenty of intrigue and inspired storytelling, Rodriguez Barron takes us from the organized and common-sense world of suburban Connecticut to the passion-driven reactions and social-class impositions of affluence in El Salvador. ''Alma [had won] her escape from a society she hated by diving into the frothy wings of her beloved sea.'' The author seamlessly moves from one world to the other, from one engrossing piece of the story to another, from Yankee coolheadedness to Latin passion with the ease of someone who knows both well. Rodriguez Barron indulges in plenty of sea-faring metaphors, but they're never gratuitous or too maudlin. In fact, some of these passages are among the author's more enlightened and spiritual: ''She understood that there was a force in the world that had a claim on everything, and that it would take back what is sick and no longer functional and make it clean and whole again.'' The sea, and Rodriguez Barron's memorable writing, are the forces that lend The Heiress of Water a pull as strong and inexorable as a Pacific undercurrent. Marta Barber is a writer in Miami.
From Library Journal
Monica Winters Borrero is a child of mismatched parents: her father is a liberal, romantic American journalist and her mother a cold, beautiful, and rebellious Salvadoran. Monica's early years in the paradise of upper-class El Salvador are idyllic. Then, in 1985, the civil war comes too close, and her mother disappears, presumably drowned. Years later, Monica is living in the United States and working as a physical therapist when she encounters Will Lucero, the grieving husband of comatose Yvette. The three end up at a clinic in El Salvador that promises Yvette a treatment that comes from the venom of a sea creature. As Monica and Will work together to investigate the mysterious clinic and its ties to secrets from Monica's past, they fall in love and discover the connection of the women of Monica's family to the ocean and its creatures. The subject of the civil war is not as fully explored as one might hope, and the mystery is relatively predictable. Still, the romance satisfies, and the descriptions of the power of the sea are beautiful and haunting. Like her heroine, first novelist Barron has a Salvadoran mother and knows the country of which she writes. Recommended for larger public libraries.-Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, OR Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
From Booklist
Secrets and lies drive the intricate plot of this first novel, which is both a gripping mystery and an intimate drama of love and betrayal. Growing up in a wealthy established family in El Salvador at the time of the civil war, Monica learns from her beloved mother, Alma, about the exciting science of the ocean, but after Alma drowns, Monica, 12, moves with her American father to Connecticut. Fifteen years later, she is a physical therapist, and one of her patients, in a coma after a car accident, might be helped by an experimental ocean-shell treatment offered in an El Salvador clinic. Why is Monica's father reluctant for her to return to where her mother died? When they do go back, Monica makes astonishing discoveries, past and present, that make her question, "Who was the fragile one after all?" In a contemporary version of the heroic quest story, Monica's search for home opens up a world of revolutionary politics, science, and passion. Hazel Rochman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.
From the Minnesota StarTribune
"The mystical symbiosis of sand and surf comes lovingly to life . . . a salty sense of oceanic sensousness."
From the Sarasota Herald Tribune.com
“I read an advance copy of "The Heiress of Water" by Sandra Rodriguez Barron (Rayo), out this month. It's a great read, about a woman whose childhood in El Salvador came to an abrupt end at age 12 when her mother disappeared in an accident at sea. Fifteen years later, Monica finds herself uprooted from a comfortable life in Connecticut by the mysteries of her past and the sad circumstances of another woman locked in a coma. Monica's mother's studies of the curative properties of the venom of a particular sea creature bring her back to El Salvador. I'm trying to convince the publisher to send Rodriguez Barron to Sarasota for a reading of this intriguing book.” Susan Rife, Book Editor Herald Tribune.com (Sarasota, FL)
From LatinoStories.com
It's rare to find a first book by an author and get the sense that the best is yet to come. Yet Sandra Rodriguez Barron shows off her writing skills in The Heiress of Water in such an impressive way that the reader can't help but feel that while this may be her first book, she certainly knows what she is doing. Barron has a gift for narration and tells this story in such a smooth way that it's not surprising that the German language rights to this book have recently been sold. The book is about Monica, a woman whose life is pulled like an ocean current toward a dark and deep unknown. Her connection with nature and more specifically, the ocean, provides her with a unique perspective on life. At the beginning of the story, we meet her mother, Alma, who has an unparalleled understanding of the ocean and the powers of the sea. A native of El Salvador, Alma has inherited a passion for cones from her own family and has made it her life mission to find the Conus furiosus, a cone snail species with the power to heal.
The mother's relationship with a reputed Communist in El Salvador during the time of the Civil War mysteriously results in her disappearance. Once she is presumed dead, Monica and her father, an American citizen, depart to Connecticut where they start their lives anew. There, as an adult working as a physical therapist, Monica meets Will, a Puerto Rican man whose wife has been in a horrible car accident and who needs a miracle. Monica and Will have a common goal--to help his wife, yet they guiltily and mutually share strong feelings for each other.
To a certain extent, this book is not what "critics" might consider literary, in part because it is about love and relationships and not about the social ills of the world. However, it's too easy to dismiss such books. Sure, on many levels The Heiress is about relationships--Monica and Will's, Will's and his wife's, Monica and her boyfriend's, and so on. But it is far from a cliche of boy and girl falling in love. As Barron tells the story, we learn about oceanic life, about El Salvador, about myths and legends, and about the upper-class. The latter is significant because while many Latino/a writers today inevitable wind up writing from the perspective of disenfranchised lower-class populations, this book is about characters with privilege. It doesn't present a perfectly realistic view of all classes, but perhaps that is not its purpose. One scene of a young, poor Salvadoran girl who gives birth and eagerly wants to give her newborn away without regret exemplifies a distorted view that the narrator has of those without money and power. While such lower-class characters are not romanticized or overly idealized, they are at times presented in a way that may be unsettling to those who are used to seeing the poor Latinos as the heroes. Still, just the fact that Rayo, an imprint of HarperCollins chose to publish a work that is about the "other" Latino socioeconomic class is a credit both to their open-mindedness and Barron's creativity.
I am unaware of Barron's plans for future novels, but based on this work, I get the strong sense that she will have a mainstream following. The story is somewhat complex, yet the author weaves it together in such a seamless, polished way, that I know I won't be the only one waiting for her second book.
From Latino Perspectives Magazine
"This perfect beach book is set mainly on the shores of El Salvador and combines elements of mystery and a multi-layered love story."
Authors:
--James W. Hall, best-selling author of Forests of the Night: “Richly conceived and lyrically written. A fine,magical novel.”
-- John Dufresne, author of Johnny Too Bad: "A stunning literary achievement, a tense, propulsive, hauntingly beautiful tale of the first order."
--Isabel Allende, bestselling author of Zorro and Daughter of Fortune: "Sandra Rodriguez Barron’s exuberant prose yields an immensely entertaining reading experience. You are fraught with the certainty that she is a gatekeeper of the secrets of the sea."
