Review of "Alicia Maldonado: A Mother Lost"
This modern, aristocratic book portrays real-life events and how
hard it is to deal with them, overcome them, or even struggle
with them. Such is life, anywhere you put it, in the Caribbean
or otherwise. Many people might have problems dealing with the
material in this book. But it's involving, shocking, yet
mellifluously elegant in its portrayal of a wealthy woman's
humble and downtrodden existence. She cannot fathom the dark
side of life, and in her pure yet misguided rebellion, she
becomes a metaphoric symbol for humanity in general--not to
mention impoverished, yet mysteriously happy.
Professor Ardain Isma's excellent first novel painstakingly
describes the fact-based life story of Alicia Maldonado, a
young, aristocratic white woman born in Cuba to a land-owning
family, members of a seemingly elite class. Alicia arrives in
Haiti with her parents and older brother Mario after fleeing
Cuba, following the political turmoil within the Batista regime.
But what she discovers there is that, in its own way, there is
no such thing as fleeing. What her family left behind had to
catch up with her slowly, surely, like a creeping plague of
sophisticated reality that could only draw to a bad
conclusion...
She marries her next-door neighbor and best friend, Richard
Laveaux, the son of a rich mulatto family, in spite of her
mother's protests. The marriage is happy at first, and Alicia
enjoys working for the family business and raising their two
children. But the altogether too soon deaths of her father and
her alcoholic husband raise questions in her mind about the
sanity and purpose of her carefully kept upper-class existence.
Was she really meant to be happy, or is something else, a
mysterious fate much darker and deeper, in store for her?
Unable to cope with her problems, Alicia leaves Haiti with her
youngest child, Jean-Marie, and vanishes without a trace. None
of her family or friends knows her exact whereabouts, and a
prolonged and heated search for her begins. How does it ever
end? How long must she suffer, and what happens?
You must find out, by reading this gripping, poignant and
sophisticatedly charming book--full of the flavor of the
islands, the richness of the soil, and the death of all meaning.