This review originally appeared on the book review blog justonemorepaige.wordpress.com.

Palacio's lyrical prose, bordering on the mystical, beautifully tells the story of a Cuban family, the Encarnacions.  Isabel and Ulises are siblings caught between parents, countries, and cultures. Their mother, Soledad, wants to take them to America, hoping for a better future for them than they would find in Cuba. But their father, Uxbal, refuses to leave his country and his revolutionary cause. So Soledad steals them away, heading to America without Uxbal, and putting into motion what will be a lifelong feeling of "pulled between two places" for Isabel and Ulises.  

Oscillating between some of the most tender and some of the harshest descriptions of family and relationships, this novel is told in the same vein as many well known Spanish language/heritage stories of magical realism. But an odd thing I noticed was that, as I read, I realized my view was much more pragmatic than in the past. Although the story is written in the tone of magical realism, and many scenes and parts could easily be interpreted that way, there was also a way to interpret the story where nothing necessarily magical is actually happening. There is rarely a point where what the author describes could truly not happen. And the reader could choose to interpret the exaggerative style as just that, just hyperbole, or as something more, as a more factual, and thus magical, telling. This time, unlike in the past, my mind steered me towards just seeing these fantastical elements as over-stating of reality, but not necessarily magical. Take, for example(s), Isabel's role as the "Death Torch,"  Ulises' size and incessant re-readings of The Aeneid, the physical presence of Uxbal's letter in the kitchen, and Henri/Soledad's rough sex after her diagnosis and cancer treatments: all border on the magical, but at the same time, all those things could also reasonably have happened and the telling of them is just distorted here.  But that shouldn't be the point, and it makes me sad that my mind automatically put that at center stage. It also makes me thankful that I read so much of Garcia Marquez before my "adult" brain decided to play more of a role. I hate that I may have lost some of the easy imagination that made magical realism such a draw for me. 

But regardless, there is some real magic in this story. It's in the way that Palacio takes a set of normal occurrences, a family life that is [in general] no more or less happy or difficult than any other's, and retells it in a way that makes it seem ethereal, spiritual, mythical. At times, I actually felt like everything that happened here was told and experienced at such a distance that I couldn't get into it, so intangible as to not be relatable, but that would be probably my only, and minor, critique. Otherwise, this was a gorgeous homage to family and to the difficulty presented by family relationships. It explores the love, the pain, the simultaneous physical and emotional closeness and distance that are found in families. And it's also an homage to a homeland, one that connects a family, that calls to them and haunts them in equal measure, a piece of themselves that each must confront. This is a story equally about the day to day survival of a family and the larger scope of their pasts, their promises, their hopes and dreams.

Soledad, Uxbal, Isabel and Ulises each face the inability to forget alongside the impossibility of remembering, and must deal with the guilt that builds from both eventualities. This exploration of their lives really comes down to the various coping mechanisms they, and we all, use to deal with those realities. Very human. Very impressive.