✍ Scribed by Beatriz Rivera
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
When Rebecca, a well-to-do Cuban-American woman, decides that she'd like to revive the old Cuban tradition of the tertulia, or women's get-together, her best friend dashes her hopes, explaining that in today's career-driven world even her friends require a compelling reason to come from all over Miami to casually meet and chat. At last, the ingenious Becky hits upon the idea of a reading group, and the book selected is a historical novel about nineteenth-century Cuba: the saga of an aristocratic dress-manufacturing clan, the Santa Cruz family. The novel is called . . . Playing with Light.
Oddly, as they get ever deeper into the story of the Santa Cruzes—especially Tico and Lolo—strange things begin to happen to the reading group. Everyone seems to be . . . sucked in . . . and affected (not necessarily pleasantly) by the saga. ("What's for dinner, Mommy?" "Get a slice of salami out of the refrigerator, dear. Can't you see I'm reading?") As two worlds, from two different centuries, begin to intertwine in odd ways, and her friends begin to . . . well, to disappear, actually . . . Rebecca can't help but wonder what she's gotten herself into.
Beatriz Rivera has written an entrancing and wonderfully ambitious novel that places her in the first rank of writers of her generation.
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