Great Reads for Great Readers

 

The Things We Didn’t Know, by Elba Iris Pérez.

 

       
     Eight-year-old Andrea and her six-year-old brother Pablo are on their way to Puerto Rico with their mother.  Mama has grown terminally discontented with life in a U.S. East Coast mill town – which isn’t even a town;  she can’t even shop for food, or socialise with any friends unless her husband Luis takes her in his beloved Oldsmobile, and he will not hear of her learning to drive:  she is effectively his prisoner, subject to every one of his whims.  Which doesn’t mean that he’s a bad man;  he just loves his job at the paper mill, loves his family and doesn’t know why she doesn’t love her life too, which is so much better than Puerto Rico.

            The only way to convince him that all is not well is to leave, to return to the life they had before America, Land of the Free, started singing its siren song – sadly, her children don’t feel the same way, especially when Mama immediately leaves them in the care of her sister Cecilia, a very kind and loving woman who would rather be a man, and lives as one.  It takes several weeks before they are used to their new living arrangements, gradually looking forward to starting school again in a strange environment but, just when they are starting to enjoy their new life with their manly aunt their Mama turns up with a new boyfriend and another sister for them to stay with.  And this sister is very poor to the extent of not having enough for them to eat:  their future looks grim, until Cecilia manages to contact their father – this criminal selfishness of a mother who refuses to mother her children has to stop, and Luis arrives to right the awful wrong his wife has created.

            But this lovely story is about much more than a marriage;  it’s about racism in all its forms:  aunt Cecilia isn’t despised in some quarters because she’s lesbian but because she’s negrito – her father was black and so is she.  Andrea finds that as she grows up, despite being blonde and blue-eyed by some genetic quirk, ‘white’ Americans regard her with suspicion, her first boyfriend’s mother as a typical example.  And her own beloved Papa is horrified and furious that she is choosing to marry a black man – never mind that he’s a University Professor:  he has fuzzy hair!

            Ms Pérez’s debut novel starts in the turbulent 60’s and covers some brutal times and huge changes in American society, especially when so many young men returned from Vietnam in wheelchairs – or coffins.  The Land of the Free is still in a state of discomfit and uncertainty, but there is always hope for it as long as they have writers like her to tell its truths.  FIVE STARS.