The Heiress of Water: A Novel - Softcover

Barron, Sandra Rodriguez

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061142816 ISBN 13: 9780061142819

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2006

Synopsis

When young Monica Winters Borrero loses her luminous mother in an accident at sea, she is exiled from the tropical paradise that was her home. Grieving and cut off from a life among El Salvador's elite, Monica and her American father move to Connecticut, vowing never to look back.

Years later, an intriguing stranger, who has endured a terrible loss of his own, enters Monica's life, bearing an unusual request. Monica is propelled back to her lost world, retracing the shadowy last days of her mother, a marine scientist who had been on the brink of understanding the therapeutic applications of a rare, venomous sea creature. Now, her research is being corrupted by a secret clinic that claims the power to restore consciousness to the comatose.

What Monica discovers will shatter the family's delicate truce with the past, and compel everyone involved to challenge their deepest notions of what it means to be alive. Atmospheric, thought-provoking, and timely. The Heiress of Water is a stunning parable of paradise lost and found.

About this title

About the Author:

Sandra Rodriguez Barron is the author of The Heiress of Water, winner of the International Latino Book Award for debut fiction. The recipient of a Bread Loaf Fellowship and a National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Grant, she was born in Puerto Rico, lived in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, and now lives with her family in Connecticut.

From Publishers Weekly:

At 12, Monica Winters is forced to exchange her privileged life in El Salvador as the daughter of the beautiful and headstrong heiress (and amateur marine biologist) Alma Borrero Winters for a humdrum existence in Connecticut with her cuckolded father after unfaithful Alma and her lover are attacked by soldiers at a gathering place for Communist rebels. His body is recovered, but Alma is lost to the sea. Fifteen years later, disinherited by her mother's family, Monica, now a successful massage therapist, is hired by Will Lucero to give Yvette, his comatose wife, a massage. A series of improbable events lands the cast at a clinic in El Salvador where researchers claim to be able to revive comatose patients using the venom of the very cone snail, thought to be extinct, that Monica's mother spent her life searching for. As Will and Monica try to deny their attraction to one another, Monica begins piecing together the truth about her mother's family (and there are many, many things to discover). Though the scenes in El Salvador are vividly rendered, Barron clumsily handles the convoluted plot's ungainly twists, but her debut is intriguing in spite of its excesses. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0061142816
• ISBN 13: 9780061142819
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320