Enchanted Prose

The noble mission of animal photography (present-day, with a look back on 180 years of photographic history; worldwide): You cannot come away from this out-of-this-world, unique visual and narrative reading experience without thinking of your own behavior towards animals. The noble mission of Why We Photograph Animals.

Can a “camera artist” capture an extraordinary animal moment to make a difference?

This weighty “visual essay” – coffee table-sized, 335 pages printed on heavy, glossy recycled paper magnificently showcases the art of animal photography – befitting the weighty raison d’être of the compilation.

Told from current and historical perspectives by versatile British author Huw Lewis-Jones, he traces over 100 animal photographers including thirty-six he interviewed based around the world (in sections called “Profiles” and “Insights”), along with 300 color and black-and-white illustrations, the book is “soul-searching.” Aimed at educating, encouraging, and inspiring all who don’t see, ignore, or existentially appreciate the integral and vital role wild animals have on the health and future of our planet. (Livestock and dogs are included but far less).

Can photographs of awe and shock engender enough “empathy and compassion” to change the course of what’s already happened? A whopping 200 species every day becomes extinct! The impossible is on every page.

Lewis-Jones offers a balance between the beauty that still exists globally and the devastation humans have caused or contributed to, intentionally or not. This book is as stunning and triumphant as it is sorrowful and critical.

The author is humble. This isn’t a book about him, yet it speaks volumes about his values and passions. He’s among the arctic photographers he interviewed and presented a few of their award-winning images, Lewis-Jones is also a wildlife photographer who’s been on twelve polar expeditions, some he led. He’s also an environmental and photographic historian, who’s written numerous books for both adults and children. Delightfully switching from serious to fun books, making it obvious he’s an educator too. In fact, the Associate Professor of Environment and Culture, and Marine and Natural History Photographer at Falmouth University in Cornwall, England. Inspiring youth about the wonders of the animal world fits his goals for Why We Photograph Animals: to provoke thinking on the whys we photograph not the hows – the more conventional type of wildlife photography book.

The image of an Asian elephant “forced” to swim underwater for a crowd of tourists, adults and children, taken by Adam Oswell (scroll down to see: https://weanimalsmedia.org/2021/11/10/interview-with-wildlife-photographer-adam-oswell/) at a Thailand zoo makes it clear both audiences need educating. In this case, on animal exploitation.

Lewis-Jones has the greatest respect for Sir David Attenborough, “arguably the greatest wildlife broadcaster.” A broadcaster too, he also admires the powerful and tireless camera work of the photographers he’s broadcasting in a literary sense.

It’s impossible in this space to describe the amazing work of all the photographers assembled for this extremely ambitious book, which seems almost impossible to imagine amassing and gathering together on such a large scale. A few are highlighted below.

Asking the same questions to varied types of wildlife photographers and cinematographers, one naming who influenced their work, three answered Ami Vitale. So let’s start with her, since their common response correlates with Vitale considered “one of the most influential conservation photographers of her generation.”

She took the image she branded The Last Goodbye on assignment for National Geographic in Kenya. Based out of Montana, she’s filmed in over 100 countries. This haunting image marked the last moments in the life of the world’s last northern male white rhinoceros, when there used to be “hundreds of thousands” roaming earth. She wrote that when her picture appeared on the October 2019 cover of the magazine’s The Last of its Kind: What We Lose When an Animal Goes Extinct issue. The man whose hands and head gently soothe the animal had been caring for him at the Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservatory. She says, “It felt like watching over our own demise.”

We feel the ranger’s grief. Is that why this precious rhino photograph moves us so much? Holding up a mirror to the grief many are writing about in memoirs in the recently minted grief genre? What role does isolation and loneliness play in the Age of Loneliness cited, in this era of human and environmental crises?

Googling we learn there’s two female northern white female rhinos left in the world. Scientists reported in January 2024 successful efforts underway using in vitro fertilization to save the species. Hope can be found here, and elsewhere in the book.

Another breathtaking image, this one stark black-and-white, touches a deep chord. Taken closer to home at New York’s City’s Bronx Zoo in 1995 by Britta Jaschinski, a Wildlife Photographer of the Year, her affecting photograph is of a trapped beluga whale. The whale’s white head appearing dolphin-like friendly, big eyes, and part of a long body stands out under black water. Viewed in between two dark corrugated open doors that can shutter this very social and intelligent animal up, captioned Captive, a singular photograph tells the story of imprisonment of wild animals isolated from their natural habitats.

Two other images Jaschinski shot continue to depict the captured theme. Gruesome, they’re almost too painful to look at. One is a gorgeous zebra’s head sliced below the neck – a hunter’s trophy – sitting in a grocery cart on its way to an unimaginable place that stores hunted down animals at a facility in Denver, the National Wildlife Property Repository. Who ever heard of such a thing? Run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service it contains 1.5 million animals according to their website. The other cringe-worthy too photograph reveals about fifteen shelves stuffed with Leonard Skins Tanned covered in plastic. She says, “If it weren’t for photographs, the world’s conscience would whither.”

You couldn’t get a more personal or popular animal to photograph than dogs, apparently the top type of digital image downloaded worldwide. Three million a day! And yet the image of one of Traer Scott’s Shelter Dogs that was euthanized, a pit-bull mixed with a Great Dane, stares straight at us with piercing eyes and a solid stance that beseeches us. Scroll down to the fourth image to see the photograph: https://mymodernmet.com/heartbreakingly-beautiful-portraits-of-shelter-dogs/.

Tim Flach gives us another canine perspective with the most adorable group of Dalmatian puppies huddled together, with their newborn pink skin, sleeping.

Stefan Christmann writes about the “good” and “bad” photos as a reflection of “how we act as humans.” 

Among the whys are also for good and bad purposes. Altruistic, joyful, and valuable ones for scientific research; education; global warming and wildlife conservation (consistently cited); adventurism; and preserving remarkable animal moments for “posterity.” The bad are greedy – trophy hunting and profit motives. Where does our lack of understanding the critical importance of animals in the health of ecosystems fit?

This isn’t dry storytelling. It’s stirring, soaring, and disturbing.

Lewis-Jones presents the best and worst of us. On how we “look at the world.” With all its splendor, diversity, and “weirdness” amidst the “dread.”

The “how we photograph” has changed, but it’s the why that emotionally resonates.

Lorraine

Forces that bind and break apart friendship, sisterhood, nationhood (Haiti, Dominican Republic, Paris, Ohio, Arizona, Florida; 1941-2003): Can an early childhood friendship survive the “broader wars of color and class”? On a Caribbean island nation with its own history of fighting color and socio-economic class divides.

Village Weavers is steeped in pathos. In what once was. Between two best friends and a country.

Much of the happiness seen happens during the 1941 to 1943 years when Sisi and Gertie instantly bonded. Seven-year-old girls who met in first-grade at a private Catholic school, Haiti’s predominant religion. Along with the joy of Sisi’s family: a grandmother who teaches her godly spirits; the warm, generous heart of her mother, a seamstress on par with French designers; and her ten-year-older protective sister, Margie, the sister of one’s dreams.

This gorgeously written story takes a long view on the relationship between two different friends from two different families in the context of Haitian society. A friendship that lets us see and feel what it means to be an outsider versus an insider, and why, sometimes, beauty comes from the outside, not the inside. Sisi is the outsider, Gertie the insider. Sisi represents the overwhelming majority of poor Haitians, Gertie a tiny fraction of the “elites.” Both will later become homesick, but it’s Gertie whose loneliness hits rock-bottom. After decades of separation, she reaches out to Sisi in 2022, the first chapter, when she’s living in Miami, the second chapter. Can she win back their friendship late in life? The fictional question.

Would the novel be as emotional searing, steeped in Haitian revolutionary history, culture, and feminism had it not been written by Haitian-born Myriam J. A. Chancy? Who shows us why Caribbean Literature is surging.

A scholar of Afro-Caribbean, Postcolonial, and Women’s studies. The endowed Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont California, whose exhaustive body of award-winning work includes “Best Book of the Year” votes for What Storm, What Thunder. Also published by Tin House, on the aftermath of one of Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquakes in 2010. (Not the 2021 earthquake Chancy notes was soon followed by the assassination of its president. Not the first time, either).

Deeply layered from a “seen world and “unseen.” Everything written, said and unsaid, has meaning. An intricate novel about differences, divides, secrets, and separations from multiple perspectives. Let’s count the ways:

As a story on Black freedom, we learn Haiti was the first Caribbean republic governed by Black people. A country that freed itself from the shackles of enslavement, separating from colonialism (French) to gain its independence at the dawn of the 1800s. Reference to the Negritude movement, which originated in Paris and spread to Haiti, embraced Black pride and dignity. Described elsewhere as rooted in literature, it also had cultural and political impact.

The image below on the left reflects racism, on the right an attempt to set the historical record straight: 

Haiti’s separation history was also with its neighbor, the Dominican Republic. Both share one island, Hispaniola, politically divided up. Among Gertie’s many separations, after her family sends her away to live with her shrewd absentee mother in a small rural village near Haiti’s seacoast, Léogâne, cutting her off from Sisi living in Port-Au-Prince, the capital, they send her to the Dominican Republic to attend a private boarding high school. She’ll live on that side of the island until she immigrates to Florida. Sisi will later leave Haiti too, first to Paris, then the Midwest and Southwest. Their leavings reflect Chancy’s, who immigrated to Canada and then the US, as well as hundreds of thousands who’ve also migrated, and those desperate to flee the unimaginable disintegration of a place.

As a personal story on Black identity, it’s Sisi and her family (her father unknown) who believe in Haiti’s spirit world: “clair – untouched by the sun.” (Not Gertie’s.) The Introduction features Iwa, “the spirit of the river gods.” The Simbi are the “misté – the “mysteries.” Water spirits are, “Of the sea before us and those of the rivers that course through the mountains behind us.” They come with a warning to “test the waters, make sure they are of pure heart.” Over the novel’s six decades, Sisi learns “not to fall for the wrong people” and the true meaning of benevolence: “We are sources of water for each other.”

As a story on Haiti’s culture, Sisi’s family also practices Haitian Vodou, a religion that “lives within us,” she says.

Others view Haitian Vodou as “devil worship.” You could say the devil has worked its cruelty on Haiti, a country that descended into political murders, occupation (after the 1915 presidential assassination US President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to quell the instability, lasting until 1934, depicted disturbingly), terror, lawlessness. Evil also worked a wedge tearing apart a friendship that had fit like “puzzle pieces.” Years later, Gertie wonders, “Can the spirits bring her to a better world?” 

Language is culturally significant. Sisi’s family speaks Haitian Creole or Kreyól. Nearly everyone in Haiti speaks the language Haitians made their own, French influenced but mostly West African. It isolated Haiti since few outsiders knew it. Whereas the Dominican Republic gained its independence forty years after Haiti separating from Spanish colonialism, speaking a common language spoken outside the island. The “upper-echelons” speak French, like Gertie’s family. French is also an official language in Haiti and the language taught in school, so Sisi and her family also speak French. One of the eye-openers is how the different languages set the two countries on divergent paths. The Dominican Republic’s economy is growing, whereas Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. Shocking, since at one time we’re told it was one of the wealthiest Caribbean nations.

Culturally, you’ll also read about street vendors when they were lively, colorful, and gossipy. With today’s gang violence and humanitarian crisis, could anyone feel safe to have any fun? The resourcefulness of Haiti’s Rara bands reminds us, though, of Haiti’s energetic spirit. Gertie hears their music when she’s sequestered near the sea.

As a story on racism, Gertie’s skin color is darker than her light-skinned family. They let their prejudice separate them from their youngest sister, as if she wasn’t one their own. Chancy also wants us to see the beauty in black skin colors, poetically describing the variety of skin tones. “Sun-kissed,” for starters.

As a story on sisterhood, Margie counsels Sisi, “Your fortune is yourself.” A special friendship can feel like sisterhood too. In stark contrast to all four of Gertie’s superficial and repugnant sisters.

As a story on memory, the “present is the past.” The past residing within us. Past and present alternate throughout and within chapters.

As a story on the meaning of home, Gertie was miserably lonely inside her mansion-sized, “gingerbread house” with its pretty pastel colors. Sisi’s home has no running water or electricity, but it has real class. At one sad point Sisi realizes, “Home is not a destination” anymore. “Earthquake” forces left their marks and scars.

As a story on feminism, Chancy’s feminist advocacy shines, also showing: “We don’t need men to give us women value.”

Lorraine

Remembering the Old when the New sweeps us away (unnamed Midwestern university and Silicon Valley, California; present-day): The Hebrew Teacher is a literary gem, with universal appeal.

Brilliantly told by Israeli-American Maya Arad, Stanford University scholar and writer-in-residence at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. The Hebrew Teacher is the only one of Arad’s nearly a dozen novels written in Hebrew English readers now have access to. A literary win since she’s considered, “The finest living author writing in Hebrew” outside Israel. You’ll see why.

The wonderfully accessible prose translated by multiple-award winning “Hebrew literary translator” Jessica Cohen deserves a shout out too for the “art and craft” of her work. Cohen also translated All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan, memorable seven years later (see: https://enchantedprose.com/all-the-rivers/). 

“The whole point of great literature is connecting one human mind and heart with another,” wrote Eileen Pollack, creative writing professor emerita from the University of Michigan in Poets & Writer’s Jan/Feb 2024 “Inspiration” issue. You’ll feel those connections to Arad’s three older Israeli narrators now living in America who tell the three stories – novellas – that unite important themes and form the novel:

• Ilana, in her late-sixties. “The Hebrew Teacher” whose story earns the novel’s title.

• Miriam, in her early eighties, visiting America, California, for the first time in “The Visit (Scenes).” To see the son she hasn’t seen in twenty-years, his twenty-year younger wife of seven years, and her only grandchild, a loner toddler boy.

• Efrat, old enough to have a thirteen-year-old daughter and discover a deeply troubling online world where, “Everything happens on phones” in “Make New Friends.”

Each story presents conflicts and struggles between Old versus New worlds on a wide range of complex issues. Each nostalgic and melancholy, seeking acceptance when possible.

“The Hebrew Teacher,” the shortest at eighty-three pages, packs a gut-punch. Framing tough questions and differing perspectives, some carrying into the other two stories. Alluding to, suggesting, and exploring: literary, linguistic, cultural, social/sociological, philosophical, ethical/moral, mental health/identity, motherhood/parenting, and technological issues. It’s the story that lets readers sense that each word has been thoughtfully considered as to how much to say, imply, leave open for the reader to interpret and contemplate.

The first story also raises hot-button political controversies. Subtly, cryptically, reading between-the-lines, tip-toeing, trying to hold back from what becomes obvious, serious, offensive, and intensely upsetting to the teacher who built the university’s Hebrew language program from scratch, elevating it to the Jewish Studies program before it became integrated with the Middle Eastern Studies program. The story that defies acceptance, hitting the core of who Ilana is.

Note: Just as Ilana tells us she’s not a political person, neither is this review and blog. The essence of Ilana’s story is an ideological political divide when the university she’s devoted her American life to hires a hot-shot, thirty-year old, Yoad Bergman-Harari, appointing him Hebrew Professor, so it’s imperative to discuss political viewpoints.

Despite Yoad’s outright rudeness, condescension, and lack of respect towards Ilana (and her other colleagues), she tries to rationalize his behavior, going out of her way to welcome him and extend kindness. Until he makes it abundantly clear he’s fervently anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian to the extent that there’s no room for discussion, compromise since he views the conflict as black versus white. No vision for a two-state solution. He goads her, not only with his one-sided, fervent politics but his manners towards someone twice his age. Someone “who was Hebrew at this college.”

The generational divide between Young and Old – attitudes towards ageism, new ideas, customs, values versus traditional ones are at play. How to be valued by youth? How to protect what you’ve created? How to remember what happened, what survived, what millions strive to keep? Contrary to Yoad, there’s nothing black-or-white about these existential questions.

Ilana, a caring, sensitive soul, cannot believe Yoad was selected for a position titled Hebrew Professor when he’s not at all interested in anything Jewish. He doesn’t teach Hebrew or Jewish literature, only uses Hebrew documents as sources for the work he’s immersed in on Martin Heidegger, the German-Jewish philosopher who was a Nazi. One of Yoad’s comments, “I’m a Comparative Literature professor, not a summer camp counselor in the Catskills” belie anti-Semitism, or the perception of it.

He also raises other non-political questions on the nature of Jewish Literature, Comparative Literature, and teaching Hebrew over Yiddish (his preference). Hebrew and Yiddish are different Jewish languages. Yiddish conversational and tied to the historical European diaspora; Hebrew seen as biblical is the historic main language of the Jewish people. Ilana points out that learning Modern Hebrew is an avenue for understanding and peace.

You’ll appreciate the brilliance of the opening line when the story comes full circle. Reflecting far more than learning a language, it’s introduced in quick brushstrokes over decades of evolving and shifting attitudes towards Israel. Beginning in 1948 when it fought for statehood (same year Ilana was born) to the early seventies when, “Everyone wanted to know a few words” of Hebrew “before they visited Israel,” to today.

“It wasn’t a very good time for Hebrew” she writes. Four lines later she wonders if instead she should say, “It was not a very good time for Hebrew.” Forty-five years in America, The Hebrew Teacher “still could not write a simple sentence in English.”

Written soon after the 2014 Israel-Gaza War named Operative Protective Edge (see enlightening interview “Academia and Israeli Expats”), when support for Israel had changed. The writing feels prescient.

Ilana defends Midwestern academia as equal to East and West Coast schools (where Yoad comes from). Noteworthy too since Arad teaches at a prestigious California university and set the next two novellas there. Stanford is among the major US universities where students have waged their own war protesting the Israeli-Hamas War.

“A Visit (Scenes),” the 2^nd novella, uses a clever writing technique dividing the 100+ page story into scenes or vignettes, creating a sense of dislocation, alienation, a dropping in. Anyone whose children don’t live near them, in this case a far distance, knows the angst of not being a close part of their children’s and grandchild’s life, while developing a positive relationship with your DIL.

The “scenes” are relatable and sad when the grandmother is awkwardly, achingly, repeatedly unwelcomed. Anyone who’s been a victim of MIL jokes knows they’re not funny. Most poignant is the lengthy estrangement between mother and son. What has she done so wrong he can’t spend a moment with her? What about gratitude for her love? The story also examines the plight of working mothers – the aloneness – and how hard it is to raise, nurture, and protect your children at every stage, starting with the preschool years.

Loneliness and relationships are deepened in the last story. “Make New Friends” also means how to keep them, applying to young and old. A story about belonging and competitiveness at school and at work that echoes the mental harm blamed on a digital world that doesn’t filter out cruelty, along with the cut-throat high-tech world.

Friends can outgrow each other. Contrary to this wise novel touching hearts and minds that won’t lose its importance.

Lorraine

How it feels to be rescued, heard, and loved (Dayton, Ohio and north/south Oregon, present-day): Tracey Garvis Graves doesn’t just write. She writes for us. To make us feel known. Heard.

From the Girl He Used to Know to the girl she becomes, The Trail of Lost Hearts is a “romantic dramedy” about the woman who wants to reclaim the girl she used to be. “A fairy-tale, beautiful and foreboding.”

From the author of Heard it in a Love Song with its playlist of twenty-eight songs, comes Graves’ newest contemporary novel with a smaller playlist yet well-chosen atmospheric, nostalgic, and sexually inviting songs from the 1970s. Lyrics that foretell what’s in store for two lost souls who meet climbing hiking trails surrounded by the “immeasurable beauty” of the Pacific Northwest’s Oregon: “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” Creedence Clearwater Revival; “Wild Horses,” The Rolling Stones; and “One of These Nights,” by the Eagles.

Embracing the popularity of hiking memoirs as a way of healing in the great outdoors, this fictional story revolves around Wren Waters, thirty-four, who stumbles into thirty-six-year-old Marshall Hendricks on the Wild Iris Ridge Loop in Eugene, Oregon. What’s the odds that would happen when she’s from Dayton, Ohio, he from Portland? That over the past five months they’ve both been emotionally hit by unspeakable losses, unbearable pain, and self-blame? “Healing and grieving are not mutually exclusive.”

What’s also the chance they’d both be into “geocaching”? What’s that you might ask if you’re not into the “world’s largest treasure hunt” that uses a GPS to guide the unearthing of a cache – in this case a capsule hidden on an Oregon trail. Marshall isn’t new to this sport and hobby, Wren is. But they’re both “outdoorsy” people. She’d given that up for an indoors man.

One of the novel’s life messages is: Don’t give up things you love. Find a compromise so you don’t lose part of who you are, and what makes you happy. Balanced. How to judge others to prevent that from happening.

Graves knows how to shape her characters. Wren may have lost the life she thought she had in Ohio, but that doesn’t mean she’s lost her competitive streak. She arrives in Oregon having endured a “deep mental funk” that her persistent BFF, Stephanie, always there for her, pushes Wren out from under the bed covers to begin her healing journey to “Take Back Her Life.” It’s Wren, though, who chooses geocaching on the majestic Oregon trails to “find purpose in the middle of nowhere.” So when Wren is the “FTF, first-to-find” a cache on her first trail she’s thrilled. Among the many emotions she hasn’t felt in a long while.

The cache is also a time capsule since everyone who finds it records their name inside to say we were here too. The prose transports us there too.

Wren and Marshall’s occupations suit the circumstances. Wren creates the content and manages social media accounts for clients, so she can work remotely from anyplace in the world, at a time in her life where the place she’s from holds too many painful memories. Marshall is a psychologist, a perfect set-up since “now is not a great time to let anyone into my brain,” Wren tells us. Giving Marshall a PsyD, Doctor of Psychology, the more modern degree, than a PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, emphasizes Marshall’s desire to save people more directly than the research-focused credential. Both are clinicians, but Graves is good at nuance.

What she’s also a pro at is how to use words to stage sexual tension. Here’s a passage depicting that:

“Looks like I won,” Marshall says when he beats Wren to a cache.

“I guess it does,” she says.

“I guess that means I get to choose my prize,” he tantalizes.

“I guess it does,” she replies, noting “the husking sound of surrender in my voice gives the words a certain tone.”

“Ready to pay up,” he asks, “and now it’s his words that carry a certain tone.”

“Depends on the price,” she says.

“It won’t cost you a thing.”

Of course it will. Letting your guard down, opening up, letting yourself be vulnerable does.

Don’t let your mind get too far ahead of wanting Wren and Marshall to come together. A Tracey Garvis Graves trademark is you will feel-so-good-but-first-you-must-go-through Olympic hurdles. Fitting on the steep and slippery trails they climb.

So expect obstacles to stand in the way. Wren tells us she’s wearing a “spiky armor” and could live happily on an all-female island, yet she also confides she’s “touch-starved” for a man. True to her bitter attitude, she ignores the six-foot, muscular, “good-looking” guy who rescues her from two terrifying men with violent intentions soon after she makes that thrilling cache discovery. How long can she sustain that stance? Meanwhile, Marshall acts like it’s nothing anyone wouldn’t do, but he, she, and we know that’s not true.

Graves is a reader of body language, seen when Wren does notice Marshall’s smile – its “guardedness.” The last thing she can deal with is a man hiding something.

The hero suggests they combine efforts. Continue their one-week hiking/geocaching plans hopping around the state together in Marshall’s Jeep. You can imagine how Wren reacts to the idea of a male “traveling companion.” Since he suggested it, what does that say about the guarded man? Who do you think opens up first? Don’t expect that too soon either.

The novel is a travelogue of sorts. Although Wren resists Marshall’s proposal, she relents accepting she needs him to protect her, physically. The two will hike Crater Lake National Park, “one of the clearest lakes in the world,” stopping at the Phantom Ship Overlook, Pumice Castle, Wizard Island, conjuring the fairy-tale part; Tumalo State Park in Bend, where the “Deschutes River runs through the small high-desert city.” Mount Hood, an ancient national forest, volcanic site, and the tallest peak in Oregon with its iconic snow-capped imagery.

The mention of an island does bring to mind the author’s first novel, On the Island. Except that woman was stranded on an island with a man much younger than her. This time Wren is stranded on an island of her own making, with a man close in age. The two may not be literally stranded, but they share an emotional need to find a way to survive and thrive after what they’ve both gone through. Their raw grief and suffering were triggered by different catastrophes that mentally had a similar effect. Making the point that “healing isn’t always a straightforward and linear process.”

Graves does a service to the stigma of a mental breakdown overcome by tragedy, sadness, anger. Made even more poignant since Marshall is supposed to be an expert on healthy ways to mend one’s psyche. Thus doubling and broadening the novel’s power. This isn’t only a woman’s survival and revival story but a man’s too.

Graves writes as if she’s talking friend-to-friend. One who needs “to be heard,” the other – the reader – who can benefit from what‘s heard.

A story of two kind people learning how to “be kind” to themselves. Will distance make their hearts grow kinder to themselves, when the hiking escape ends? Will Wren and Marshall find a way to get back to each other?

Lorraine

Discovering what truly nourishes you (Barranquilla, Colombia and Brooklyn, NY; recently and ten years ago, with thirty years of memories): “Caminito was the start and ending of this story” is a telling opening line from The Waves Take You Home.

Which takes you by surprise. Not what you might expect from a contemporary novel set in Colombia: a Latin American country besieged by drug trafficking, crime, violence, impoverishment, and people increasingly risking their lives to cross into our US borders.

Not a novel straight out of the news. A novel straight from the heart of María Alejandra Barrios Vélez, who lived by the Caribbean Sea in northern Colombia. Her hometown Barranquilla, where you’ll discover a restaurant you will not forget, Caminito. A place where lives have been built around, sacrificed for. Where the main character, Violet or Vi, never wanted to leave.

A Caribbean coastal region where the waves come from. Where the title signals the author’s intent to take the reader to a place she knows but we likely don’t. Where a restaurant is at the center of Vi’s life, until she was eighteen. Pushed to migrate to America, not by choice but by emotional anguish, out of respect for and obedience to the strong woman who raised her and owns Caminito: Emilia, her Abuela, Spanish for grandmother. She wanted Vi to have the freedom to choose what she wanted her life to be, rather than tied down to a kitchen Vi was intentionally not allowed in. Her destiny already planned, unbeknownst to her. 

Breaking the cycle of generations of women without choices in one family also meant breaking apart Vi’s young love with the Lebanese son of a butcher who dreamed of becoming a doctor, Rafa. The one who “dreamed harder than anyone” and “held on to the ones he loved.”

Caminito isn’t just a restaurant. It’s an “institution” in the El Prado neighborhood, where a tropical climate fuels more heat to this heart-filled and heart-aching story to save a restaurant. Caminito has a long, colorful history like its once elegant neighborhood, depicting “styles brought by German immigrants, Italians, Syrians, Jews and Lebanese.”

Caminito is connected by a path to Vi’s family’s home, but no one spends much time in it. You’ve probably been to a family restaurant like this one: the proprietor’s young children sitting around one of the tables obediently doing their homework, coloring in notebooks, hearing laughter and loud conversations, relishing the food, like the special recipes created by Emilia – Colombian Spanish dishes and foods from the local cuisines – beloved over its thirty-year history.

Vi and an orphaned boy Anton, whom Emilia took under her wings, wouldn’t be seated together at that table. He’d be in the kitchen learning how to cook alongside Emilia. Vi would be the one at the table, taking in the “rhythm of the restaurant” while coloring. The lyrical prose befitting. 

Unlikely you’d see Vi’s flamboyant Mamá Paula, since she’s barely around, popping in but mostly disappearing. Their relationship has been quite strained, caught up in a bitter pattern of a mother’s criticism. Not that Emilia is touchy-feely either with her tough love approach, but she was always there for Vi, not like her own daughter, the “tropical queen of ice.”

Early chapters fast-forward to Vi at twenty-eight, when she’s graduated from a college in Vermont majoring in art working as a struggling freelance illustrator in NYC, living the past four years with Liam, an architect, in Brooklyn, where Veléz now lives. Gig artists in a city that’s one of the centers of the art world adds another dimension.

Magical realism takes the story to an entirely different realm, after Vi learns her Abuela has passed away and feels she must leave to help Caminito having also learned it’s on the brink of financial disaster.

Emilia hasn’t finished her time on earth. A believer in Colombian folklore, in ghosts, like Latin American writers, among them Gabriel Garcia Márquez, considered a “founding father” of the magical realism genre. Vi is the only one who feels Emilia’s ghostly “cold air” presence, sees and talks with her, since she will not settle down until Vi’s life is settled.

What V encounters takes her “complicated” view of home to another level too. One of the novel’s searing questions is: How do you know where you really belong? A different take on the concept of belongingness – one culture ingrained in her, another she hopes will be.

This story is about far more than saving a restaurant, when the odds are stacked against you. When everyone must step in including the community, yet it’s still not enough. Esprit de corps jumps off the pages. Caminito represents joy, heartbreak, tradition, community, pride, resilience, and conquering “love over fear.” In Vélez’s bona fide hands, it’s deeply passionate, emotional, and awfully romantic.

This kitchen is HOT, with the burdens and conflicts of responsibilities to one’s family. Hotter when you add in the ingredients for competing forces of love – one rooted in the soul, the other newer roots. One more intense, the other easier, safer. Liam wraps Vi in love so the city can feel like home; Rafa will always mean home. If you’re blessed with the love of two good men, how do you decide which one to let go of?

Authenticity also comes from the language of the people. Much discernible or translated, but not all the tempting dishes. Too many to name. Below are images of two, one satisfying the sweet tooth, the other comforting – pastel de gloria and arepas. Food, a deep part of the culture. “Creativity mixed with dignity.”

One the novel’s mysteries is why Emilia bequeathed Vi the largest share of the restaurant when all she wanted was for her to have nothing to do with it?

Liam says he’ll do anything for Vi, but can he? White and from a wealthy family, can he truly understand what Caminito and Vi’s slice of Colombia mean to her? What it means to be an immigrant in America? Who’s a woman of color? They’re happy in their Brooklyn cocoon, but what happens when the protective shell is broken and Vi returns to Colombia to save Caminito?

How do you decide when to stay or go? El Prado may be “stuck in time,” but should Vi be?

Lorraine