The Tilting House
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Two estranged sisters with a complicated past and an acrimonious present reunite in 1990s Cuba to confront the riddle of family amid the scars of political upheaval
In the summer of 1993, Yuri, a teenage orphan, is living with her strict, religious aunt Ruth in a Havana suburb when Mariela, a thirty-four-year-old artist, arrives from the United States with a shocking revelation. She claims to be Yuri's sister, insisting that she and Yuri share a mother, and that Ruth essentially kidnapped her when she sent her into exile against her will through Operation Pedro Pan. Forced to grow up in orphanages, Mariela spent the past three decades in the United States and has returned to Cuba to reclaim her roots, make art, and perhaps seek vengeance on Ruth. Yuri is both fascinated and repulsed by the young, glamorous, and aggrieved Mariela. When Ruth is jailed for unknown charges, Yuri falls further into Mariela’s mercurial orbit.
Spanning two countries and three decades, The Tilting House explores identity and family loyalty, the effects of losing one’s mother and motherland, the scars of political and historical upheaval, and an immigrant’s complex quest both to return “home” and to be free from the past. Through her long journey, Yuri comes to understand that the past cannot be fully recovered, or fully escaped, even as she approaches the possibility of compassion for Mariela, for Ruth, for others, and for herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lamazares (The Sugar Island) sets this immersive bildungsroman against the backdrop of Cuba's economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's 1993, and 16-year-old Yuri is being raised by her aunt Ruth following her mother's death four years earlier (Ruth has been unable to contact Yuri's long-lost father in the United States). When a 34-year-old woman named Mariela arrives from the U.S., Ruth initially claims she is her long-lost daughter, sent to America in the 1960s as part of Operation Pedro Pan, when unaccompanied children were evacuated for better opportunities. Eventually, Yuri learns that Mariela, a photographer and painter, is actually her older sister, and has returned to Cuba to make art. After Ruth is arrested and held in jail on unspecified charges, Yuri gravitates toward the comparatively free-spirited Mariela, who hosts salons in Ruth's house. The author offers a nuanced view of the country's turmoil during the so-called Special Period, when residents faced a vertiginous mix of extreme poverty and newfound opportunity, and the revolution's "traitor worms" began to return. The narrative ends with an affecting scene set during the Cuban thaw of 2015, with Yuri exploring her family's fate. Readers will be moved.
