Evamar
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Sep 8, 2026
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- $10.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Three starred reviews!
From award-winning author Margarita Engle comes a “spellbinding” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) novel in verse about first love, hidden cultures, and ancestral connections that follows a teen’s journey to uncover her late grandmother’s roots in Cuba.
Just before she was transformed
into an invisible spirit
my grandmother whispered her last wishes
into my ear:
Sprinkle my ashes in a patch of girasoles,
wait patiently, harvest the seeds,
fly to la isla, find el jardín,
plant las semillas.
Then and only then—
read my diaries.
Evamar has arrived in Cuba with her abuela’s ashes and her mother’s warnings: Don’t talk politics, boil the tap water before you drink, y por favor absolutamente, don’t fall in love. But then she meets Río, a captivating drummer whose music and presence she can’t ignore.
Río bears his own scars, separated from his family in the United States. As their bond deepens, Evamar discovers an ancestral treasure that could change her future—and the lives of millions of Caribbeans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In alternating sections, two teens narrate this spellbinding identity-focused verse novel from Engle (Island Creatures). After her beloved folklorist grandmother, Evasol, dies, third-generation Cuban American 17-year-old Evamar sets out for Cuba with detailed instructions to return Evasol's remains to her garden. Shorter interstitials follow 18-year-old Río, a talented percussionist who was deported to Cuba at 16 after spending most of his life in Florida. Alongside her older brother Cedro, Evamar—raised by her linguist father and archaeologist mother in Elizabeth, N.J.—makes her first trip through Cuba with other young Cuban Americans. When she meets Río, hired to translate for her tour group, their attraction is immediate: "Are we really/ reading/ each/ other's/ translucent/ minds?" They approach their connection cautiously, mindful of their impending separation, but their bond intensifies when they discover, and vow to disseminate, a dictionary of both their ancestors' disappearing Taíno language and its links to other vanishing Indigenous tongues. Lyrical narration is rendered with a striking mix of romanticism and reality ("The night sky becomes a waterfall/ of sound/ and/ stars"), with Spanish text—accompanied by translations—smoothly incorporated throughout. It's an immersive love song to the power of both ancestral history and first romance. Ages 12–up.
