Yuri is a 16-year-old orphan who lives simply with her religious aunt in a big, old house in Communist Cuba in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.<\/p>\n
Yuri’s parents had named her after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin, hoping that one day she would grow up to be a famous female astronaut. Yuri now has vague hopes of being accepted into the Lenin school, Cuba’s prestigious preparatory.<\/p>\n
Yuri and her Aunt Ruth’s quiet lives are suddenly turned upside down when an unexpected visitor from “la Yuma” — slang for the United States — shows up at their Havana home with a camera swinging from her neck and announcing she is family. Ruth later tells Yuri that 34-year-old Mariela is her daughter, and that when Mariela was an infant she sent her to live with a family in the United States through Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. government program in which thousands of unaccompanied children were sent from Cuba to Miami in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n
“The Tilting House,” by Miami-based writer Ivonne Lamazares, is an affecting and sometimes amusing coming-of-age novel set in a country that few have had the opportunity to visit, despite its proximity to the U.S.<\/p>\n
It’s a study of hidden family secrets, the unhealed wound of losing a mother and the quest for home.<\/p>\n
Lamazares, who was born in Havana, knows her homeland well, and her book is rife with description and historic detail that only someone with first-hand knowledge could provide. Lamazares left Cuba for the United States in 1989 during a period of shortages and deprivation known as “The Special Period in Time of Peace.” Her first novel, “The Sugar Island,” also set in Cuba, was translated into seven languages.<\/p>\n
In “The Tilting House,” Yuri is quickly pulled into Mariela’s chaotic world and her absurd art projects, which include a tragicomic funeral for Ruth’s dead dog, Lucho, in a public park using highly illegal homemade fireworks. Ruth, already viewed as suspect by the government as a member of the small Jehovah’s Witnesses group, is arrested and sent to jail on unexplained charges.<\/p>\n
Mariela later tells Yuri that they aren’t cousins, but sisters, and that their now-dead mother gave birth to her as a teenager. Mariela insists that their Aunt Ruth “kidnapped” her and sent her to live in the U.S., where she was raised on a farm in Nebraska.<\/p>\n
More harebrained projects follow, and the family’s tilting house finally tumbles after neighbors and acquaintances slowly chip away at the building to repurpose many of the structure’s materials.<\/p>\n
Yuri later emigrates to the U.S., where she studies and starts a career that allows her to make a return visit to the island. On that trip her past becomes clearer, and she reaches something approaching closure and forgiveness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yuri is a 16-year-old orphan who lives simply with her religious aunt in a big, old house in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-27882","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}