What does an author do when she nears the end of her life and hasn't been able to finish all the stories in her head? In The Cemetary of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez, Alma is our author in question. She has had a successful, prolific career, but there were just some stories she couldn't finish, and they are driving her mad. Her solution? Move back to her country of origin, the Dominican Republic, and bury them. She builds a most irregular cemetery and creates final resting places for all the books she never wrote. When the stories refuse to rest peacefully, we, as the reader, hear them after all.
This book was interesting and mostly enjoyable. I felt like it became a bit disjointed with all of the intermingled stories and switching of points of view, but perhaps that was the point. This book did one thing that I really don't care for: it had no quotation marks. It was difficult to tell what was narration and what was dialogue. I found myself frequently bouncing back a few lines to clarify who was speaking and which words were actually said out loud. There were beautiful lines of prose, and the stories were compelling. There was plenty of drama from the broad cast of characters. I liked this book, but I didn't love it.
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