![]() ![]() He’d made his brooding peace with retiring his gun and badge, hiding out on his ranch, and communing with horses and ghosts. ![]() He lost his wife, his family, even his country in the late 1870s when the Rio Grande shifted course, stranding the Mexican town of Olvido on the Texas side of the border. Solitario Cisneros thought his life was over long ago. This novel, just released in September, is next on my TBR (to be read) pile. A difficult novel to read with its descriptions of torture, but so very important as it shows a dark time in history from which we can no longer afford to shy away. This novel is only made more powerful in that the author’s half-sister was one of the disappeared and he only interred her remains in 2019. The protagonist travels to Hades, led by ghosts, to face the truth of the Argentina he fled. It makes literal the hell that the family of the desaparecidos, the disappeared ones, had to live through. Oh, this is such a powerful novel about the mass murder of thirty thousand people in Argentina’s Dirty War. Gorgeous language, fabulous and flawed characters, generational trauma, and a tree full of secrets are at the core of this gorgeous story. A sweeping family saga full of family intrigue, magical gifts, and an unknown murderer who is killing a generation one by one, this book is one you will be unable to put down until it’s finished. In this stunning adult debut from Zoraida Cordova, readers are drawn into the world of the Montoya family. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova It wasn’t until the writing of this essay that I realized I had, in fact, written a murder mystery. So, I took this story and imagined a variation of the shooting for the center of the novel-bringing in issues of classism and racism-and set the main character, Isla, on a quest to discover the truth. One sibling tells a story of a particular incident, and another remembers it very differently or denies it happens at all. This whipflash of accounts frustrated me at first, I mean, he could have been murdered for all I knew! But it also made me realize that at the heart of most family stories is mystery. They didn’t tell Jorge because he was too young to understand. After Jorge’s death, however, I recounted this to their half-brother Esteban who said, “No, he did shoot himself, and I know he was sick, I saw the hospital reports. He died in a hospital.” I was pissed, felt lied to by my mother. After her death, I told her brother Jorge this and he laughed. When I asked why he shot himself, my mother told me that he had tuberculosis and didn’t want to burden the family. It used to terrify me, to think of that violent death on the other side of the wall. My whole life I was told that my great-grandfather shot himself in a room in my great aunt’s house, the room next to where I slept each summer. ![]() But much of the novel is fiction, and it was in the telling of one particular story, the death of my great-grandfather, that a murder mystery narrative arose. So, it was a natural addition, this magical thread, because it has always seemed to me that when I’m on my mother’s island, a tiny crackle of magic rides on the heavy afternoon air. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was raised with novels from my mother’s bookshelves that I read again and again. Unexpectedly, what came with the descriptive language was a whiff of magical realism. I wanted to capture the lushness of my family’s property in Bayamón, the thousand shades of green, the scent of night blooming jasmine, and the taste of ripe bananas grown in the backyard. “There was always an old woman dying in the back room of my childhood.”įrom there I dove into treasure trove of stories from my Puerto Rican family and blended them with my own experiences being raised in a mixed-culture household in the nineteen sixties and seventies. We were talking about how cultures treat their elderly, and I was talking about Puerto Rico: So much to keep track of and you have to mete out all the clues…” Instead, this book started with a comment I made during a conversation with some writer friends many years ago. ![]() In fact, if you had asked me when I’d first started in this craft if I’d ever write a murder mystery, I would have said, “Oh HELL no! They’re too hard. When I started writing my novel, The Storyteller’s Death, I didn’t plan on putting a murder mystery at its heart. ![]()
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