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Summary and Reviews of Where There Was Fire by John Arias

Where There Was Fire by John Manuel Arias

Where There Was Fire

by John Manuel Arias
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • First Published:
  • Aug 29, 2023, 288 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Sep 2024, 288 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A lush and lyrical debut novel about a Costa Rican family wrestling with a deadly secret, from rising literary star John Manuel Arias

Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company's most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde's family is changed forever.

Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family's rupture, steeped in machismo, jealousy, labor uprisings, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantations in Central America.

Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There Was Fire.

Teresa, Barrio Ávila, 1968

Some still talk about how hot that night was. Old women whisper it over coffee, their just-as-old husbands debating over checkers outside. Even a tow truck driver named Luis, born that night, has been told about the malignancy of the heat. Its teeth. He says if his mother hadn't known any better, she would have sworn she'd just given birth to the Antichrist.

That Friday was good until it wasn't. Crucifixion reenactors drank clandestinely in bars, pyretic palmers unlocked their knees to scuttle home. Time wasn't tallied, because the priests who normally manned the belfries lay naked inside the darkness of their churches, praying for the heat to pass. No singing bells to interrupt the hours. At dusk, it felt as if a second sun had risen—a sugar-white impostor with no warmth to its light. The full moon climbed center-sky, its body no longer a mirror but a magnifying glass focusing its beams on San José's valley. It cast long ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. The fictional American Fruit company plays a large role in the novel, and in the lives of the Cepeda Valverde family for generations to come. What are some of the challenges Tácito and José María face while working at the American Fruit Company?
  2. What did you know about how bananas were grown and the pesticide Nemagon before reading this novel? Has it changed how you feel about the fruits you consume and how they're produced?
  3. There are a lot of secrets in this book, from corporate cover ups to deeply hidden family secrets. What resonated the most with you and why?
  4. The novel explores family members in three different generations, and the impact of their decisions on future generations. What are the decisions your ...
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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Though a man lights the match that ignites the plot, the book succeeds on the strength, folly, desperation, and hope of the Cepeda Valverde women. Teresa's longing for a reconciliation with Lyra, a relationship with her grandson, and some way of making sense of her mother's murder are rendered with delicate and anguished precision. Lyra is perhaps the most stable member of the family, but her anger toward Teresa for her neglectful behavior after the events of 1968 and her grief for Carmen burn incandescent. In the 1995 timeline, Barrio Ávila is a hollowed out shell of its former self, the abandoned train on the defunct railroad tracks a symbol of emptiness left behind after the destruction of the corporate leviathan that birthed it...continued

Full Review Members Only (794 words)

(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).

Media Reviews

Debutiful
Every page is a masterclass in how to wrap a reader inside of a book. Simply put, this book will make you want to re-read it just to spend more time with the writing.

Good Morning America
When poets write novels, you just know they'll be good ones.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Until this novel, Mr. Arias has been primarily known as a poet, and so the language is often lyrical and affecting — one of the novel's strengths, especially in the moments where the narrative develops into magical realism. Giant cane toads are harbingers of misfortune and "speak" through the characters' emotions; jaguars pine in the jungle at moments of high drama.

The San Francisco Chronicle
This novel showcases its author's lyrical gifts and deep, personal knowledge of Costa Rican history and agribusiness. In scintillating prose, John Manuel Arias, who is also a poet, tells the story of a family rent apart by the ruthless banana industry and a deadly fire that impacts multiple generations.

Publishers Weekly
Arias shows a knack for arresting images...as he winds back and forth through time. The novel is strongest capturing the complications of love and the parental struggle not to inflict the traumas they inherited on their children. It's a rewarding outing from an exciting new voice with a prowess for lyricism.

Kirkus Reviews
A striking debut rich in secrets and sadness.

Reader Reviews

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Beyond the Book



The United Fruit Company: The Scourge of Central and South America

Black-and-white photo of a United Fruit banana boat on water, with land visible in background, circa 1945 In Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and elsewhere in Central America and the West Indies.

UFC was born in 1899 when the Boston Fruit Company merged with the Central American banana companies of businessman Minor C. Keith, who owned a railroad system in the region (in the novel, the American Fruit Company was founded by a "distant cousin" of Keith's). By 1930, UFC employed more people in Central America than any other ...

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Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

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