Book Review: The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Algonquin Books

For many writers, the unfinished stories that lie dormant in their minds and in their files often haunt them — their characters not resting until their arcs have some sort of resolution. In Julia Alvarez's The Cemetery of Untold Stories, these tales gain a life of their own.

Alma Cruz is an author who wants her characters to be able to rest in peace. Unlike other friends and colleagues in the writing world, who often drive themselves to the point of madness over their stories, Alma finds solace in the idea of allowing hers to be laid to rest when she can no longer continue them.

Inheriting a plot of land in her home country of the Dominican Republic, Alma decides to build a cemetery — but not a traditional one. Instead of people being buried here, the land instead holds the graves of the stories she's been unable to finish over the years for one reason or another. Among them are the story of Bienvenida, the second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, and that of her own father, a doctor who escaped an oppressive regime to the United States for a better life.

But these stories demand to be told, and when a local woman hired as groundskeeper begins hearing these characters tell their tales, she becomes their listener.

Alvarez' novel intertwines historical fiction with magical realism, allowing readers to step into another time in another world, immersed in Dominican culture as well as much of its brutal history as seen through the eyes of both those with privilege and those without.

Lyrical, moving, and with wit and charm woven throughout, The Cemetery of Untold Stories is some of Julia Alvarez's finest work and is sure to inspire any who read it to continue their stories, as each tale we tell is never really finished. 

Algonquin Books // 243 pages // Historical Fiction, Magical Realism