By Julia Alvarez
The PW Book Review Circle meets the third Monday of every month at 7:00pm in the church library and by Zoom. Anyone is welcome to join us at any time. We try to select books that are readily available at public libraries or are out in paperback.
Questions? Contact Susie Highley at shighley@aol.com
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.
Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas and soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma’s characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo’s abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.
Future Book Review Circles
- September 15, 2025: West with Giraffes by Linda Rutledge
- October 20, 2025: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Audio highly recommended!)
- November 17, 2025: My Next Breath by Jeremy Renner (Audio highly recommended!)
- or another memoir
- January 26, 2026: The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (4th Monday)
- February 16, 2026: Author in Chief by Craig Fehrman
- or The President’s Wife by Tracy Emerson Wood
- March 16, 2026: The Good Part by Sophie Cousens
- April 20, 2026: TBD Wendell Berry Book
- May 18, 2026: The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick
- June 15, 2026: The Martha’s Vineyard Beach & Book Club by Martha Hall Kelly
- July 20, 2026: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
