The Heiress of Water: A Novel

✍ Scribed by Barron, Sandra Rodriguez

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 174 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780061142819

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

At 12, Monica Winters is forced to exchange her privileged life in El Salvador as the daughter of the beautiful and headstrong heiress (and amateur marine biologist) Alma Borrero Winters for a humdrum existence in Connecticut with her cuckolded father after unfaithful Alma and her lover are attacked by soldiers at a gathering place for Communist rebels. His body is recovered, but Alma is lost to the sea. Fifteen years later, disinherited by her mother's family, Monica, now a successful massage therapist, is hired by Will Lucero to give Yvette, his comatose wife, a massage. A series of improbable events lands the cast at a clinic in El Salvador where researchers claim to be able to revive comatose patients using the venom of the very cone snail, thought to be extinct, that Monica's mother spent her life searching for. As Will and Monica try to deny their attraction to one another, Monica begins piecing together the truth about her mother's family (and there are many, many things to discover). Though the scenes in El Salvador are vividly rendered, Barron clumsily handles the convoluted plot's ungainly twists, but her debut is intriguing in spite of its excesses. (Sept.)
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From

Secrets and lies drive the intricate plot of this first novel, which is both a gripping mystery and an intimate drama of love and betrayal. Growing up in a wealthy established family in El Salvador at the time of the civil war, Monica learns from her beloved mother, Alma, about the exciting science of the ocean, but after Alma drowns, Monica, 12, moves with her American father to Connecticut. Fifteen years later, she is a physical therapist, and one of her patients, in a coma after a car accident, might be helped by an experimental ocean-shell treatment offered in an El Salvador clinic. Why is Monica's father reluctant for her to return to where her mother died? When they do go back, Monica makes astonishing discoveries, past and present, that make her question, "Who was the fragile one after all?" In a contemporary version of the heroic quest story, Monica's search for home opens up a world of revolutionary politics, science, and passion. Hazel Rochman
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