Las Madres

March 1, 2023

In 2017, Luz returns home to Puerto Rico with family and friends--the "madres" of the title--hoping to recover memories lost in a 1975 accident that took the lives of her accomplished scientist parents. The first novel in a decade from an author whose memoir When I Was Puerto Rican was a major best seller. Prepub Alert.

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June 12, 2023
Santiago (Conquistadora) delivers an immersive intergenerational saga set in New York City, Maine, and Puerto Rico. Lesbian couple Ada and Shirley and their friend Luz are the “las madres” of the title; Luz’s daughter Marysol, whose apartment is across the hall from her mom’s in the Bronx, and Ada and Shirley’s daughter Graciela, who lives near her mothers in coastal Maine, are “las nenas.” Marysol and Graciela were born in the U.S. but feel a visceral attachment to Puerto Rico, their mothers’ “homeland.” As the group prepares for a trip to the island to celebrate Shirley’s 70th birthday in 2017, Graciela, who has been told by Ada and Shirley that she was conceived by Ada in a long-forgotten one-night stand, “wonders whether DNA testing might shed some light on her parentage.” Meanwhile, flashbacks to mid-1970s Puerto Rico recount an accident that left an adolescent Luz with a traumatic brain injury, and when an unexpected turn of events brings the group to familiar Puerto Rican neighborhoods, long-held family secrets threaten to surface. Santiago wrings palpable emotion from her characters, and hauntingly portrays Hurricane María’s devastating effect on the island. There are false notes, including Graciela’s characterization-via-hashtag (“she considers herself #spiritual”), but also a profound sincerity. This tenderhearted story of trauma and recovery has undeniable appeal.

July 1, 2023
A Puerto Rican woman displaced from her home and her own past builds a surprising life. Teenage Luz Pe�a Fuentes is happy growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1975. Her doting parents, Salvadora and Federico, are multilingual research scientists who provide their only child with a warm home and complete support for the lessons she hopes will lead to a career as a ballerina. Their love helps counter the bullying she sometimes suffers as "the tallest girl and the only Black one" in the ballet school. But a car crash destroys Luz's world, killing her parents and leaving her with serious physical and mental disabilities. She has no memory of her earlier life--a small mercy in that she can't remember the accident and, for a short time, she forgets what racism is. For the rest of her life, the few memories she can hang onto will be secondhand--the memories others tell her about, not her own. The novel alternates between Luz's girlhood and her life four decades later in the Bronx in 2017, where her grandfather took her to live after the accident. He's gone now, but Luz has a family circle to support her. Two of them are women who have cared for her since the accident: a lesbian couple named Shirley and Ada. Luz, Shirley, and Ada call themselves las madres. The rest of the circle is las nenas: Luz's daughter, Marysol, and Ada and Shirley's daughter, Graciela. Luz functions well in some ways--she married and had Marysol, then lost her young husband in another tragic event. She makes a living as an artist but still has almost no memory and is dependent on the other four women in daily life. To help answer Marysol's longing to understand more about her mother's past and her native Puerto Rico, the five women plan a vacation there--in hurricane season--that will be full of unexpected challenges and shocking revelations. As can happen in novels with narratives split between different time periods, in this one the chapters set in the 1970s are more vivid and engaging than many of those set in the present, which can bog down in extended passages of exposition. Luz's shattered memory serves to a degree as a metaphor for the Puerto Rican diaspora and the lasting effects of colonialism, but the book's core is its strong female friendships. An unusual take on the power of memory.

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July 1, 2023
Santiago follows the lives of three Puerto Rican moms and their daughters as they juggle their sense of duty to their families and to their homeland while protectively guarding secrets and values they hold dear. The story mostly centers on Luz, tall and Black and from a progressive-minded family in Puerto Rico who is an accomplished student and ballet dancer. Just before her sixteenth birthday, her life is upended by a devastating car accident that leaves her orphaned and suffering brain trauma. Alternating between 1975 and 2017, the story depicts a difficult yet fulfilling life for Luz as she moves to New York and becomes a mom to Marysol, seemingly unperturbed by her tragic past, the full extent of which readers will slowly become privy to as the novel progresses. Santiago's large cast of characters also includes Graciela, Marysol's best friend and the daughter of Shirley and Ada, Luz's closest friends. The past and present collide when all five take a fateful trip to Puerto Rico and encounter locals who hold secrets about what Luz left behind.

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