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Elaine Castillo
April 4, 2018 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+0
FreeElaine Castillo discusses her debut novel, America Is Not The Heart.
Praise for America Is Not The Heart
“Elaine Castillo’s entrancing and magnificent debut is set to be a standout work of literature. Don’t say you were not told. What a dazzling book!”—NoViolet Bulawayo author of We Need New Names
“With the sheer propulsive power of her voice, Elaine Castillo blasts readers into her story.”—John Freeman, editor of Freeman’s
“The creative accomplishments of this story are incredible: this unexpected family, this history, this embrace of the sacred and the profane, this easy humor, this deeply felt human-ness, this messy, perfect love story. Elaine Castillo is a masterful, heartfelt writer.”—Jade Chang author of The Wangs vs. the World
About America Is Not The Heart
Three generations of women from one immigrant family trying to reconcile the home they left behind with the life they’re building in America.
How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero de Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she’s already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay in the Bay Area, knows not to ask about her past. And his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their daughter Roni asks Hero why her hands seem to constantly ache.
Illuminating the violent political history of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s and the insular immigrant communities that spring up in the suburban United States with an uncanny ear for the unspoken intimacies and pain that get buried by the duties of everyday life and family ritual, Castillo delivers a powerful, increasingly relevant novel about the promise of the American dream and the unshakable power of the past. In a voice as immediate and startling as those of Junot Diaz and NoViolet Bulawayo, America Is Not the Heart is a sprawling, soulful telenovela of a debut novel. With exuberance, muscularity, and tenderness, here is a family saga; an origin story; a romance; a narrative of two nations and the people who leave home to grasp at another, sometimes turning back.