LAS MADRES

A Puerto Rican woman displaced from her home and her own past builds a surprising life.

Teenage Luz Peña 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.