From the bestselling author of In The Time Of The Butterflies and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, comes The Cemetery of Untold Stories. In this novel, author Alma decides to create a cemetery for the stories she will never finish in her lifetime, after she inherits a plot of land in her native Dominican Republic. But when she hires local Filomena, to tend the grounds, her employee can hear the ghosts of the characters and stories.

This book weaves a few different story threads into one narrative, there’s Alma and her sisters, there’s Filomena and her family, and then there’s the story of Bienvenida, an unfinished story about a historical figure who is also linked to Alma’s father. All the stories are woven together and intertwine a little bit. The book has a lovely amount of magic realism, with the grounded life stories and the magic in the stories and the graveyard.

I’ve always love the expression or concept of “not dying with your music inside you”, reminding us to create and sing our song while we can, but I also think our to-do list will never really be empty. We won’t be able to make and do all the things we want in one lifetime. This idea of a graveyard of the unfinished creative output drew me to this book. In the story, there’s a slightly different driver for Alma, as Alvarez puts it like this, quoting the Bible, “if you do not bring forth what is inside, what is inside will destroy you.” In this story, Alma feels that her friend was driven mad by a story that had a grip on her but that she couldn’t write and get out of her system. This is maybe a slightly darker take on creativity, but I think not an uncommon one. But I was really drawn to this idea of a graveyard and the magic realism in this story, and it’s used very well.

The tone or style of the book reminded me a little of Alice Hoffman or Isabel Allende, especially her earlier work, where the story is very detailed, has quite a few different characters and has a flowing, storyteller or almost fairytale-like style. The mundane is magical and the magical is mundane. Everything is woven together and flows. That’s not to say that Alvarez doesn’t have her own unique voice, she definitely does, but I just really appreciated that more literary style.

Perhaps, as you’d expect from a story about a graveyard, this book is a little melancholy and maudlin in tone sometimes. There are some wonderful bonds and relationships in this book, and beautiful, bittersweet moments, but there is also darkness, broken hearts, dictators, a little murder and domestic violence, some sexual assault. It’s not gratuitous, or in any way a gruesome book, it’s more about telling the story of how all lives contain a little tragedy and desperation. Or sometimes a lot of those things. But life also has humour and drama, and we all have our story. The book asks us to think about the stories that are never told, that die with us, and if they are meant to be told or not, or are they for someone else, someone special like Filomena, to catch on the wind? Sometimes the untold can be sacred.

Read It If: you love rich, magical stories about life, love, family and community. This one has a lovely literary tone and should also please Alvarez fans.

Thank you to HBG Canada for the copy of this book for review.