Book Summary and Reviews of The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

Book Summary

Literary icon Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies shares an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling and her homeland of the Dominican Republic.

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 them: 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 author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. 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.

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

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. The characters who are "buried" in Alma's cemetery reveal parts of their lives that their "creator" didn't know about. What do you think that says about the role of a novelist and the limitations of a storyteller?
2. Consider these two lines from the novel: "We don't get free until we write our stories down" and "Some stories don't want to be told. Let them go." Can both statements be true? How so?
3. Some people waiting at the gate to Alma's cemetery are allowed in; others are not. What makes one storyteller gain access and another not? In our world, what does this say about whose stories get to be told? (Think of bestseller lists and school curriculum lists.) Whose stories are not getting told in Alma's cemetery?
4. The ...