Review: Afterlife

Afterlife by Julia Alvarez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Afterlife is a story about life after loss. No sooner has literature professor Antonia Sawyer retired from teaching than her husband Sam, a physician, suddenly dies, leaving her to navigate the loneliness of widowhood and the limits of literature, religion, philosophy, and all homilies that she's been raised with. Antonia, one of four sisters, is struggling in her day to day life. She has some degree of community engagement with the Mexican migrants in her small community near Burlington, Vermont. She has served as a translator for the local sheriff on several occasions, though since she's of Dominican descent, the colloquial Mexican Spanish terminology for things isn't always at her fingertips. She hears from Mario, an undocumented farmhand living and working a farm down the road, that his fiancee, Estrella, is headed up from Mexico. Just as Estrella arrives about to give birth to a baby that can't possibly be Mario's, Antonia's older sister Izzy goes missing and Antonia rushes off to help her other two sisters find her. They are quite worried because, in spite of being a Ph.D. psychologist, Izzy has always had poorly managed mental health issues. Is she hypomanic or manic? Is she developing dementia, as their mother did? Drama piles up when Antonia briefly returns home to find Estrella hiding in her garage, in tears, hungry, thirsty, and desperate because Mario has kicked her out. Only seventeen, Estrella is without a guardian, and in the last month of her pregnancy. Torn between the need to help find her missing sister and helping the underage pregnant girl who has no one, Antonia's quiet life is suddenly filled with challenges and further loss but she finds her footing, guided by the memories of those she's loved.

This is a quiet, poignant novel. One of the things I loved about it is that Julia Alvarez gives us a protagonist who has reasonable boundaries, who knows her limits and thoughtfully expresses them to those making demands on her in her time of grieving. A lovely story. I'm eager to read more of Alvarez's work.

The audiobook is beautifully narrated by Alma Cuervo.

I received a courtesy copy of this novel in audiobook form from the publisher, via Libro.fm.

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