THE VOLCANO DAUGHTERS

A captivating rendition of early-20th-century El Salvador.

Graciela and her four closest friends grow up on a coffee plantation nestled on a volcano, surrounded by the “joyful ferocity” of their mothers’ love. Their lives on the estate are simple but vibrant. They think little of men, including their fathers, until a man from the capital comes looking for Graciela. Her absent father was the second-in-command and spiritual adviser to the ambitious general referred to as El Gran Pendejo, and he has died. She is summoned to the capital to pay her respects and there meets her long-lost sister, Consuelo, who was kidnapped from their village by her father as a gift for his barren wife. Both now trapped under the thumb of the general, the two reluctantly grow close until El Gran Pendejo, who has bloated into a full-fledged dictator, unleashes unspeakable terror on the nation’s Indigenous population. The inhabitants of their home village are massacred, including Graciela’s childhood friends, who narrate this tale from beyond the grave. In prose that, while supple, does not stray from the harshness of history, the voices of these four murdered girls unite in a ghostly chorus to project the story of their friend and her sister, survivors of genocide. Their visions of Graciela and Consuelo are riveting; the two women, both striking characters, build physically separate but spiritually linked lives in California and Paris in the 1930s. Balibrera eulogizes the lives lost in La Matanza, the real-life 1932 massacre of the Pipil people by the Salvadoran government, and underscores the value of holding one’s culture close, even when it threatens to disrupt just-scarring wounds. Despite the singular narratives sanctioned by those in power, “every myth, every story, has at least two versions,” and “if you don’t tell it properly, if you say it too quietly, you erase everyone’s face as you go.”

The resilience of sisterly bonds forms the backbone of this swirling, heart-wrenching debut.