Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is now currently being hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

Blurb from Goodreads

Literary icon Julia Alvarez returns with an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling itself that will be an instant classic.

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 revisions, 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 the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma’s characters unspool their secret tales. Among Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

The characters defy their they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories 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.

Readers of Isabel Allende’s Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez’s extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity that reminds us the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! Wow. How time flies! Today is the second to the last Monday of the first month of 2024. The past weeks have been very tedious at the office. However, it isn’t lost on me how time zoomed past by. I hope that the first three weeks of the year have been kind to everyone. I hope that the rest of the year will be filled with blessings and great news. I also hope that everyone had a great start to the week. I know, Mondays are our least favorite day of the week, at least the majority of us. But have we got any other choice other than shrugging off the sluggishness we feel? I really wish that weekends were longer. Anyway, I hope that the rest of the week will be great. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy throughout the year. With the new year comes the time to turn in new leaves.

To kick off another blogging week is a fresh Goodreads Monday update. This has become a weekly ritual; the week would not be complete without one. Anyway, my 2024 reading journey has been productive, so far. I guess I was able to sustain the momentum I gained in the past two years, the two most amazing reading years I have had to date. I hope that I don’t lose this momentum as the year progresses although I must say that I have quite lofty goals this year. My reading challenges are brimming with thick books. As such, more than lofty goals, I have set realistic goals. But before I get lost in a sea of words, let me go back to what this post is about. Unlike the previous two Goodreads Monday updates, I am featuring a book written by a familiar name.

It was in 2020 – oh, the first year of the pandemic – when I first encountered Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez. Her novel, Afterlife, was part of my 2020 Books I Look Forward To List. Unfortunately, I was not able to obtain a copy of the book. Interestingly, it was the only book in the said list that I was not able to read; 2020 was the closest I was able to complete all the books on my annual most anticipated reading list. Anyway, my foray into Alvarez’s oeuvre started with How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents. I was unimpressed but this did not stop me from wanting to probe into her body of work further. I was planning to read In Time of Butterflies last year but due to time constraints, I was unable to.

Fast forward to 2024. Through most anticipated book lists, I learned that Alvarez was releasing a new work, The Cemetery of Untold Stories. If my first novel by Alvarez is any indicator, the novel will prominently touch base on one of the darkest phases of the Dominican Republic’s contemporary history: the Trujillo dictatorship. I believe that this is a constant in Alvarez’s work but I am not going to complain because I am interested to learn more about the regime and how it has affected the country and its denizens. I am also interested to learn how it has influenced the modern Dominican Republic. The titular Untold Stories might refer to those whose voices were muted by the regime, like the Mirabal sisters who were featured in In the Time of the Butterflies.

There is so much I am looking forward to in The Cemetery of Untold Stories which is set to be released on April 2. I sure hope that it will be available here in the Philippines. How about you fellow reader? How was your Monday? What books have you added to your reading list? Do drop it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday and, as always, happy reading!