Tía knows best
And a novel about a Talpa artist who tackles her Irish demons
DEATH OF A TELENOVELA STAR
In this spare, bite-sized narrative, Marlene Martínez, an ex-cop in Havana, now owner of her own Bakería Cubana in Miami, spoils her young niece Sarita with a quinceañera cruise from Miami to Cozumel.
What promises to be an uneventful seven-day snooze involving dining at identical onboard restaurants called Delicious and Scrumptious, booking swimming-withdolphin adventures and quick hits to Mayan ruins, turns into stalking the C-list telenovela star – drop-dead handsome, aspiring reality TV actor Carloalberto, whom starstruck Sarita spots on deck preening with his bored model wife, Emma, and the smitten older screenwriter, Helen Hall, who is helping advance his career.
Sarita is the perfect eye-rolling, selfie-seeking teenaged foil to Tía Marlene’s no-nonsense, cool-as-cucumber observer – her “bloodhound” instincts honed as a detective in the Cuban police force. And what she sees of Carloalberto – who seems to be beholden to some goon in a Hawaiian shirt hovering in the casino and is spotted in amorous embrace with the homely Helen – does not jibe with Sarita’s hormonal squeals of delight at his presence on the ship.
When Carloalberto disappears, Sarita moans at the “tragedy” to her cellphone clique back home in Albuquerque, but Marlene, more attentive to the superior desserts she appraises in the ship’s restaurant, saw it coming.
Author Dovalpage, born in Havana, now living in Hobbs, is an accom
plished novelist, ESL professor at New Mexico Junior College and Taos News’ own translator from Spanish. She lends Marlene a sympathetic backstory in Havana, involving “a slow, painful disillusion with the system” and a cunning, two-timing lover.
The novel is a marvel of thrilling economy, peppered with Spanish dichos (e.g., Eso huevo quiere sal, or “she’s coming on to him”) – and the relationship between aunt and niece zings with verisimilitude. And this: Will Marlene and the cute pastry chef, Benito, meet again in Miami?
Author Dovalpage will hold a free Zoom reading via SOMOS on Nov. 21 at 7 p.m. Go to somos.org to register and join.
SPLINTERS:
A MODERN MYTHIC JOURNEY By Sandra Richardson
(2020, 221 pp.)
Closer to home, “Zandi” Richardson’s intriguing debut novel follows another lone woman transplant, Alex – newly relocated from New York City to Talpa to pursue her art and antiquities business.
Betrayed by an ex-boyfriend and living uneasily with a medicine man ghost in her 150-year-old adobe home at the foot of the Taos Mountain, Alex has been plagued of late by recurring dreams involving the Celtic warrior woman, Danu.
In the dreams, Danu is riding over vast mountains on a white steed and hounded by a scary, jealous witch, Queen Raef – “fear” spelled backward. Raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Alex knows a thing or two about Celtic myths, having fled “the Troubles” with her father in the early 1970s, after the death of her mother in a bomb blast.
Alex enlists numerous friends and acquaintances to help expel these “splinters” of past trauma from her life. She visits a Zuni shaman, among others, and even travels to Rome and Ire
land in order to confer with experts on Druid magic. Her relationship with her alcoholic father, now deceased, continues to rankle, and she recognizes that in order to reclaim her feminine power, she must go to battle, literally, with the vengeful Queen Raef.
Richardson, who hails from Sydney, Australia, and heads her own Nomad Foundation, throws in the arsenal of mythic forces, symbols, stones, gods, goddesses and cats in this jam-packed adventure – keep your “Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology” handy.