Ranch Librarian Reads: Next Year in Havana

Next Year in Havana, by Chanel Cleeton

Genre

Women's Fiction, Historical Fiction

356 pages


I love a beautiful cover on a book. Truly, I do. I know that I'm not supposed to judge a book based on the cover, but let's all get real here for a minute: sometimes we judge a book by it's cover, don't we? With Next Year in Havana, I was immediately drawn to the gorgeous cover, and the pages of the book turned out to be just as wonderful.

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I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a novel chosen by Reese Witherspoon for her book club would be wonderful (after all, she's the lady who made Wild and Gone Girl into films). But the bottom line is this: if you love a good work of historical fiction, you will love this novel.

Next Year in Havana is a lovely tale that flip-flops back and forth between the story of Marisol, a Cuban-American woman born and raised in Florida, and her grandmother, Elise, a wealthy Cuban socialite living through the revolution in Cuba in the 50s.

At the start of the novel, Marisol travels to Cuba in 2017, after the death of Fidel Castro, to spread the ashes of her recently deceased grandmother. She enters Cuba expecting to find one thing: a sense of her history, a sense of the beautiful Cuba her grandmother loved; and instead, Marisol discovers that her grandmother had secrets she'd not shared, and the beautiful Cuba her grandmother loved is still fraught with tension over the current regime.

As Marisol explores the country, she befriends the grandson of a friend of the family, Luis, who shows her Cuba as she tries to unravel the story of her grandmother's secret romance with a young revolutionary, Pablo.

Flashbacks to Elise's life at the end of the 1950s give the reader a view into that secret romance, and the difficulty of a wealthy socialite loving a revolutionary, bent on destroying the class system that supports Elise's life.

Cleeton's love for Cuba is obvious in the pages of this novel. She describes the landscape in loving, flowing detail, and it's easy to imagine why someone would love the country of Cuba for all her beauty. At the same time, Cleeton clearly understands the warring tensions at play in the country, making it a great and terrible place at the same time.

What I loved about this novel was the back and forth between the historical and the modern story, tying them together with lovely, lyrical writing. It's easy to imagine the Havana of Elise's life, opulence juxtaposed with poverty and overflowing with glamour; and it's simple to picture the Cuba that Marisol discovers: a country trying to rebalance itself after the death of a dictator, suspect and welcoming together of tourists.

Next Year in Havana is a wonderfully romantic read, with two strong and interesting heroines struggling to make sense of themselves in the country they are from, despite the odds that are stacked against them.