I can’t believe this is my first Julia Alvarez story. The Cemetery of Untold Stories was whimsical. It’s a story about all of the stories we have in our lives untold. The ones we hide, the secrets to confess, and the people we need to find. Keep reading this book review of The Cemetery of Untold Stories for my full thoughts.
Summary
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.
Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma’s characters unspool their secret tales. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
The Cemetery of Untold Stories is about the stories that get buried by sand and dust. That are buried with shovels and dirt. It’s multiple stories in one. These people that come into our lives for a moment, side characters, and twists of fate. Family which love us, test us, and hurt us to protect us. This book is about all the stories we have inside of us untold. What happened if we never got a chance to tell them?
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There’s this beauty to The Cemetery of Untold Stories. I was able to listen to it on audiobook and read my copy and it felt like an homage to oral stories. Listening to the narration from Alma Cuervo was fantastic. There’s a distinct sense of character – which is saying something considering the number of them – and it feels special to listen to a story told to another by someone else. The ones passed down around fires, with cups of tea, and in whispers. Sometimes we try to put the stories to bed and sometimes we have to stay up late. Find The Cemetery of Untold Stories on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.