This novel shows that the struggle to come out, due to the strictures of the dominant society, has always been painful and hard won. We like to think that same-sex love isn’t just defensible but also beautiful, not only in its normalizing Pete Buttigieg version, imitative of heterosexual marriage, but also in its quirkiest manifestations.
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IN ERNESTO MESTRE-REED’S novel Sacrificio, Rafa is a penniless Afro-Cuban teenager from the rural eastern part of the country who travels to the fishing village of Cojímar, famous as the setting for Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea. Rafa is cruised and picked up by Nicolás, then taken to Havana to become a waiter in the semi-legal restaurant run by Nicolás’ family. Welcomed as another son by Nicolás’ strong-willed mother Cecilia, the family struggles to make do while catering to the dwindling number of “Yuma,” foreign tourists.
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IF you’ve been following the buzz on this book, you may wonder how Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan—two very different kinds of authors—decided to team up on a novel. As the story goes, Boylan dreamed that she’d written a book with Picoult, and she tweeted about it. Picoult saw the tweet and said some version of “Why not?” This is an important fact to know when you pick up Mad Honey. There’s a larger reason for the presence and contribution of both authors, and it lies within the story.
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WITH HIS FIRST NOVEL, Homo Novus, Gerard Cabrera has written an emotionally charged and deeply moving story of two men and the paths that brought them together. As the story begins during Holy Week in 1987, readers find a Catholic priest, Father Linus Fitzgerald, in a hospital in Massachusetts. He is very sick and is being looked after by a young seminarian, Orlando Rosario.
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