PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAside from snippets of expository text that situate Vanishing Maps as a stand-alone novel, the book is not invested in explaining the Cuban diaspora to the unfamiliar ... García seems less interested in the land mine of historical accuracy than in the emotional registers of its fractured interpretations ... Alongside her own stylistic experimentation, García allows for a slipperiness between what is real and what can only be explained in the untranslatable languages of specters and Santería.
Isabel Allende
MixedNew York Times Book ReviewVioleta chronicles a feminist awakening amid twin repressive forces, the state and the domestic sphere, in passages whose sheer breadth is punctuated by sometimes stilted, explanatory dialogue ... One might crave the inventive details that made Allende’s debut novel an icon of post-Boom Latin American literature ... This novel forgoes such chimeras in favor of headline realism in a stylistically straightforward translation ... Compellingly unsentimental ... [The] middle section, the novel’s strongest, chronicles the events leading to dictatorship in a country much like Chile...in unflinching, breezy prose that narrows its focus to the class and gender tensions playing out in daily life. Violeta offers humorous reprieves and no-nonsense ruminations ... Violeta’s naïve, sometimes colonialist lens results in a reckless romanticism ... Violeta’s reckoning leads to the development of a foundation to support survivors of domestic violence — but a conclusion that \'if you truly want to help others, you’re going to need money\' is circular logic that feels like a watery offering on a blood-soaked altar, a quiet tiptoe off the page after a careful rendering of the political graveyards that haunt Latin America’s psyche.
