The Storyteller's Death
Ann Dávila Cardinal
Sourcebooks Landmark
Fiction, Fantasy/General Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Isla was eight years old and a thousand miles away when her beloved father died. She'd been sent to stay with her mother's relatives, the sprawling Sanchez family, in Puerto Rico as she had been every summer, and her mother didn't tell her about the death until she returned to New Jersey. Since then, her life has crumbled around her, as her mother escapes into alcohol and she struggles to stay afloat. Her only safe haven is her summers in Puerto Rico, in the home of her stern great-aunt and under the judgemental eye of her iron-fisted grandmother. Here, she loves listening to the vivid tales woven by her elders, stories of colorful ancestors and relatives and their seemingly larger-than-life exploits, adventures, and incidents, where truth and fiction often blend.
It wasn't until her grandmother passed away many years later that Isla began seeing those stories come to life around her, vivid recreations that play out daily.
Is it some sort of hallucination or daydream? Is her mind finally cracking under the many stresses of her life? Or has Isla inherited a gift - or a curse - that has passed down the Sanchez line for generations... and, with it, shouldered the burden of stories that the dead demand be shared with the living?
REVIEW: After a middling reading selection in July, I wanted to start August out on a better note, so I thought I'd switch up genres a bit; while The Storyteller's Death may technically have fantastic elements, it's more in the "magic realism" sense that shades into general or even literary fiction more than straight-up fantasy. (Also, this was part of a "great library read" via Libby.) By the end, though, I found the middling streak unfortunately continued.
The story, which is ostensibly told by an older Isla about her formative years and experiences, opens with an eight-year-old girl encountering the face of impending death; a relative across the street from her tia's house where she stays in summers offers hospice care to elderly, dying family members, and she ventures into the "forbidden" room... not that this is her first encounter with infirmity, what with her father hospitalized in New Jersey. There's promise in this opening, if no real hint of how any of it ties in to the concept that was promised in the blurb (the whole "stories coming to life around her" thing). But from there the story drags its feet and meanders through Isla's miserable childhood, her dysfunctional relationship with her alcoholic single mother and how it costs her opportunities for normalcy and friends, and how it's only in Puerto Rico that she has anything like the love and support and freedom she craves. Slowly, she comes to realize that there's a lot more to the island, the Sanchez clan (more of a dynasty), and class and race divides than her half-white outsider viewpoint initially sees, a point first driven home when she befriends the son of a laborer and is firmly berated by her great-aunt for fraternizing with "those" people. More foot-dragging and meandering ensues, with some foreshadowing and a sprawling cast of relatives and friends and not-friends, and eventually Isla encounters her first experience living through a story after her grandmother passes away. The Sanchez family is not big on sharing secrets, let alone discussing potential mental illnesses or supernatural events, so Isla struggles to figure out what is going on and to whom she can reach out - not at all helped by the weight the Sanchez name carries, which makes reaching out to others problematic, even if it seems they might be the only ones with the answers she needs. Eventually, she figures out what's going on and what she can do about it, but the visions only grow more vivid with each new encounter, to the point where they can actually inflict harm, even if she can't physically alter events. Belatedly, she encounters the one story that proves most pivotal to her family and her current situation, a particularly stubborn tale that becomes a mystery she needs to unravel... a mystery where she and everyone else conveniently forget something previously established (that stories, or rather the memories encapsulated in the stories, can be colored or outright fabricated by the deceased storytellers, and thus can't be trusted to reveal unvarnished truths). At some point, someone mentions how the threads Isla unearths in her research begin to sound as tangled and implausible as a telenovela - which, unfortunately, predicts the ultimate truth she uncovers (I don't deal in spoilers, but let's just say I found it stretched credulity to the point of being almost cartoonish). Along the way, Isla does a fair bit of growing up, learning to find her voice and her place and what it means to be a Puerto Rican, a Sanchez, and - most importantly - herself.
There are several good parts in the story. It paints a vivid, textured picture of what the island was like in the 1980's, and the disillusionment that comes with discovering the complexities and darkness hiding in the family tree, as well as realizing, to quote how Douglas Adams put it in The Salmon of Doubt, "how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left". The living stories were intriguing, but - and admittedly this comes from the fantasy reader in me, who can't help poking at general fiction or crossovers looking for deeper magic - I'd hoped more would come from them, and more explored about the whole concept, particularly how they could be solid enough for Isla to be physically harmed by them even though she alone experiences them; that point ultimately felt like an excuse to lend urgency to solving the mystery, because the story that gets "stuck" involves a firearm with a potentially-lethal-to-her bullet. I found the whole thing felt just a little too long for the story it told, some of the revelations and resolutions a little too forced.
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