The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a wonderful novel about the stories we have to tell and how important it is that we tell them. The novel explores the lives of a Dominican American author named Alma, her sisters, her father, their lives as immigrants, and stories of their homeland and culture. Alvarez beautifully weaves different narratives together as Alma creates a beautiful graveyard where she plans to bury her unfinished manuscripts.

I read this book for FREE using my public library card with the Libby App. Yay Libraries!

Breezy Afternoons’ Review of Cemetery of Untold Stories

From the very beginning, Cemetery of Untold Stories is captivating. Alma Cruz is a celebrated novelist who has risen to fame as one of the most influential authors during the diversification of American literature movement. She gives a lot of speeches, sits on panels, and is well respected in her field. The novel begins with Alma fretting that she will someday end up like another author friend of hers, a woman who showed immense talent and dedication to the craft but slowly lost touch with reality and, subsequently, everyone she loved.

As Alma and her sisters divide up some small parcels of land in the Dominican Republic, land which their father had once received as payment for medical services, Alma begins to plan her retirement. She chooses a large but worthless parcel of land near a city dump, leaving the more valuable pieces to her sisters.

Alma consults an old friend, an artist, who agrees to create statues for each of her stories. These statues will act as tombstones and will preside over the ashes of the manuscripts that Alma never finished. All is going well, except some of the stories won’t catch fire and burn, no matter what they try.

Among the stories that will not burn include a tale of the forgotten second wife of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, Bienvenida, and a doctor who fled Trujillo’s Dominican Republic and established a new life in the United States. Certain visitors of the cemetery can hear Bienvenida and Manuel telling their stories if the wind is just right.

Filomena, a woman who lives across the street from the cemetary, becomes the caretaker for the grounds. She can hear the stories as they are told, and she shares her own story. Filomena’s story is unfinished, as well, and the events of her life become seamlessly intertwined with the others.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a lovely novel. Epic love and grief, sacrifice, betrayal, sisterhood, the extremes of human capacity for love and violence – a story about the extraordinary tales that an ordinary life leaves behind. I gave this book five stars, and there was no question about it.

Publisher’s Summary

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 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 soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma’s characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo’s abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

 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. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

Other Novels by Julia Alvarez