Pre-numbered label used for registration.

discarded by library
hardback
300pp
published, 1997

FROM THE PUBLISHER
It is the story of Reina and Constancia Aguero, Cuban sisters who have been estranged for thirty years. Reina, forty-eight years old, living in Cuba in the early 1990s, was once a devoted daughter of la revolucion; Constancia, an eager to assimilate naturalized American, smuggled herself off the island in 1962. Reina is tall, darkly beautiful, unmarried, and magnetically sexual, a master electrician who is known as Companera Amazona among her countless male suitors, and who basks in the admiration she receives in her trade and in her bed. Constancia is petite, perfectly put together, pale skinned, an inspirationally successful yet modest cosmetics saleswoman, long resigned to her passionless marriage. Reina believes in only what she can grasp with her five senses; Constancia believes in miracles that "arrive every day from the succulent edge of disaster." Reina lives surrounded by their father's belongings, the tangible remains of her childhood; Constancia has inherited only a startling resemblance to their mother - the mysterious Blanca - which she wears like an unwanted mask. The sisters' stories are braided with the voice from the past of their father, Ignacio, a renowned naturalist whose chronicling of Cuba's dying species mirrored his own sad inability to prevent familial tragedy. It is in the memories of their parents - dead many years but still powerfully present - that the sisters' lives have remained inextricably bound. Tireless scientists, Ignacio and Blanca understood the perfect truth of the language of nature, but never learned to speak it in their own tongue. What they left their daughters - the picture of a dark and uncertain history sifted with half-truths and pure lies - is the burden and the gift the two women struggle with as they move unknowingly toward reunion.

FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
If her accomplished first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, marked Garcia as a writer to watch, this compelling and resonant story of thwarted relationships, intense, unslaked desires and family secrets surely confirms her promise. Set mainly in Cuba and Florida, its protagonists are not true sisters but half-siblings, a secret revealed gradually and tantalizingly as the circumstances of their mother's death and their father's suicide become clear. Reina Aguero, 48, a statuesque master electrician, lives in a Havana apartment, surrounded by the stuffed remnants of her parents' careers as naturalists. The unflagging attentions of many men fail to cure her insomnia or her restlessness. Her older sister, Constancia, is in New York, married to Heberto Cruz, the brother of her first husband, who fled when she became pregnant. Both sisters have rebellious children floundering because they're unsure of their heritage. When bland Heberto sells his cigar shop and retires to Key Biscayne, Constancia establishes a wildly successful cosmetics business catering to Cuban women. Then Reina, whom she has not seen in 30 years, arrives and subjects their relationship to new tensions. The sinuous and absorbing plot provides recurrent bursts of surprise delivered with deceptive simplicity. In typifying the Cuban dilemma in the Agero sisters, Garcia gives us beautifully nuanced portraits of a riven people, separated by more than an ocean. Those in Cuba stoically endure repression, hunger and humiliating shortages; the wealthy exiles living in the U.S. are florid in their self-pity and desire for revenge on Castro. Garcia's lushly vibrant prose evokes a tropical atmosphere and a seething sexuality, both steamily intensified by santero rituals and mystical phenomena. The two sets of cubanas share a belief in superstitions, omens and the power of magic in a world in which "Miracles arrive every day from the succulent edge of disaster, defying nature." When Constancia wakes up one morning with her mother's face, her metamorphosis is entirely persuasive to the reader. Unmoored by the reverberating effects of the revolution, Garcia's characters search for stability and meaning in a world where fatalism is their only belief. They all endure "the fidelity of certain, unshakable pain,'' but sudden insights illuminate their different routes to salvation.

Library Journal
Garcia's magisterial new work opens with a murder: in Cuba's shimmering Zapata Swamp, Blanca Aguero turns in time to see her naturalist husband, Ignacio, point a gun at her and pull the trigger. At the heart of the novel that then unfolds are the two daughters of the ill-fated couple: sensuous, statuesque Reina, a master electrician who cheerfully serves the revolution until a certain inexplicable restlessness-and a nasty encounter with lightning-send her into exile, and the carefully preserved Constancia, who hates leaving New York for Miami when her timid husband retires but whose homemade Cuerpo de Cuba emollients really take off. Constancia has a problem, though; one morning, she awakens not with her face but her long-dead mother's, a reminder that we carry with us-indeed, we are-our past. Ultimately, this is less a novel about two sisters than an evocation of Cuba itself. In less capable hands, the richly imagined details would swamp the sense of story, but Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban, shapes her material beautifully, keeping the reader with her until the end. Highly recommended.

School Library Journal - Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Half-sisters Reina and Constancia Aguero can't bear one another's personalities, life styles, or friends. Constancia leaves Cuba with her young family to seek relief from Reina and Castro in the United States. As the women grow older, they are drawn together by the need to establish the truth about their parentage. In order to overcome their rivalry, they must find and face the truth about their heritage and themselves. Readers know the answers from the beginning and this perspective insures empathy with the eccentric cast of characters. Through the many varieties of relationships the sisters have with friends and family, Garcia reveals their emotional, intellectual, and cultural depths. She uses the characters' unusual qualities to mirror the absurdities of life and points out that all humans are linked together in this basic fabric of humanity. The complicated plot offers an adventurous romp through some of the spicier bits of life along with journeys into its darker depths. The Aguero Sisters will appeal to teens who enjoy writers like Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, and Laura Esquivel, all of whom skillfully capture the intricate relationships of the peoples of Central and South America.

RELEASE NOTES:

inside ziploc bag