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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Editors' Choice and a finalist for the International Latino Book Award
"Engel has an eye for detail. She knows how to drown the reader in a sense of enchantment... She writes exquisite moments."--Roxane Gay, The NationReina Castillo is the alluring young woman whose beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the community, throwing a baby off a bridge--a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. With her brother's death, though devastated and in mourning, Reina is finally released from her prison vigil. Seeking anonymity, she moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys where she meets Nesto Cadena, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting with hope the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana. Through Nesto's love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her as well as its role in her family's troubled history, and in their companionship, begins to find freedom from the burden of guilt she carries for her brother's crime.
Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, with The Veins of the Ocean Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.
Author Notes
Patricia Engel is the author of Vida , which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and Young Lions Fiction Award, and the acclaimed novel It's Not Love, It's Just Paris , winner of the International Latino Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic , Boston Review , A Public Space , Harvard Review , and Guernica , among other publications and anthologies, and received numerous awards including a 2014 fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After Carlito Castillo, on Florida's death row for tossing his girlfriend's infant daughter off a bridge, commits suicide, his sister, Reina, a manicurist, abandons her weekly prison vigil and moves from Miami to the Florida Keys. She wants to disappear, to process her loss and dissect her brother's actions, yet she quickly befriends Nesto, a Cuban exile. She learns of Nesto's own jail-like life in Cuba, and about the family he left behind and continues to support. Before long, the two become inseparable, romance blossoms, and Nesto begins teaching Reina about Yemayá, orisha of the oceans, whom he claims Reina must appease in order to right her sibling's past. Now working in guest relations at a tourist dolphinarium, Reina uses Nesto's teachings to observe the park's confined dolphins, captives stolen from their natural habitat for the amusement of humans, and she begins a journey of self-discovery and reflection, developing a plan that will bring one of Yemayá's children back to the open sea. Engel (Vida) has written a thought-provoking novel about different types of prisons, including Carlito's physical imprisonment and Reina's mental and internal incarceration. The author writes with vivid language, building a world of equal parts misery and hope. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
After her older brother Carlito kills his girlfriend Isabela's baby girl because he thinks Isabela is cheating on him, 23-year-old Reina feels trapped trying to comfort him on death rowuntil his death frees her to start over in Crescent Key, a place where nobody knows her family history. At first, Carlito claimed he didn't throw Isabela's baby into the river on purpose; it was, he said, an accident. Never mind that it's the same thing Carlito's father, Hector, did to 3-year-old Carlito when he thought his own wife had cheated on him. Back then, Carlito survived due to the lifesaving efforts of nearby fishermen. But now, alone in solitary confinement, Carlito "doesn't try to act remorseful or even say he's innocent anymore," says Reina. Somehow Engel (It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, 2013, etc.) is able to find a lightness in a disturbing story to carry the reader through the novel. But this effervescent, breezy voice does jar, at times, with the dark subject matter. Still, Engel has crafted a detailed, rich world of vivid atmosphere and imagery: "the hum of the ceiling fan blades hit me like a torrent of screams," Reina thinks, after her brother is found dead, a suicide hanging from the electrical cord of his fan. Finally free of her weekly visits to the prison, Reina moves to Crescent Key and finds companionship with Cuban immigrant Nesto Cadena and with the local dolphinsuntil she realizes that the only way she will truly be free is to reckon not just with Carlito's death, but with the rest of her family's ghosts as well. Here is the casual violence of menand the tired acceptance of it that women face. But through it all rises Reina's voiceher belief in optimism, in family, in the importance of life. A dark comedy with unexpected heart. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH Patricia Engel's sumptuous second novel, Reina Castillo, a young woman fleeing the demons of her past, stands on the deck of a boat contemplating her first dive into open water. "Out here is where the ocean floor drops off," one of her more experienced companions explains, pointing to the darkness all around. "Didn't you notice how clear and light the water is when we're closer to land? That's because it's not so deep. Then the ocean floor takes a big hit hundreds of feet down and you're out here, in the blue." "The Veins of the Ocean" is its own willing plunge into deeper, darker realms. Like her critically acclaimed debut, "Vida," an episodic collection of vignettes in the life of its central character, and the novel that followed, "It's Not Love, It's Just Paris," this is the coming-of-age story of a young Colombian-American woman negotiating independence, romance and the ties of kith and kin. However, with its richly layered narrative structure - filled with the echoes, or ripples, of past events reverberating in the present - and its deeply conflicted exploration of the tangled web of family loyalty and responsibility, the novel offers proof of its author's developing maturity. The narrative opens with two acts of brazen, almost classically tragic, vengeance. Discovering that his wife has been unfaithful, Reina's father throws her 3-year-old brother, Carlito, off abridge into Biscayne Bay. Rescued by a fisherman, he grows up as a golden child, treated "like he was baby Moses." But the Castillos are a family with "all sorts of inheritances." Confronted with his own fiancée's infidelity, Carlito re-enacts his father's violent punishment, hurling her daughter to the sort of watery grave he himself had escaped. Yet the novel is no wild revenge tragedy; instead, it examines a tragedy's aftermath. Carlito takes his own life before the state can do it for him - "This is Florida, where they're cool about putting people to death" - but only after Reina has put hers on hold with seven years' worth of weekends dedicated to visiting her brother in prison. Haunted by guilt over the role she played in provoking Carlito's crime, she leaves her old life in Miami behind, drawn south to the "drifter territory" of the languid, swampy Florida Keys, "where people go to forget and to be forgotten." There she meets Nesto Cadena, a Cuban mired in his own suffering, a man for whom the freedoms of democracy can't ease the estrangement he feels, having left his children back in Havana. Engel writes with a raw realism that elevates her characters' mundane existence - their failures and failings, hopes and dreams, pleasures and pains - to something majestic. At the heart of her storytelling is a deep sense of compassion. This is a writer who understands that exile can be as much an emotional state as a geographical one, that the agony of leaving tugs against the agony of being left behind. She sees the potential danger faced by young women encountering the world and grasps with acute precision the "mixed-up, messy sort of love" that can shackle together the members of a family. To immerse oneself in Engel's prose is to surrender to a seductive embrace, a hypnotic beauty that mingles submersion with submission: "You just want to go deep enough to arrive at that moment when your thoughts stop and all you feel is the water and your heartbeat." LUCY SCHOLES is a contributing editor at Bookanista.