In São Paulo-born American author Samuel Park's posthumous second novel, a Brazilian immigrant looks back on her childhood with her charismatic mother.
In the early 1990s, 26-year-old Mara Alencar shares a small apartment in Bel Air, Calif., with two fellow Brazilian immigrants. An undocumented worker, she earns her living looking after Kathryn, a 44-year-old American divorcée with stomach cancer. Kathryn responds to Mara's compassionate care by trying to make their relationship more personal, promising to leave Mara her house and offering herself as a stand-in for Mara's mother. The attention makes Mara uncomfortable, as does her front-row seat to Kathryn's complicated relationship with her ex-husband, who no longer loves her but still sleeps with her out of pity. Nevertheless, Kathryn's spirit and suffering remind Mara of her mother, Ana, who had a stint as an accessory to political rebellion at a critical point in Brazil's history.
Like Kathryn, Park (This Burns My Heart) suffered from stomach cancer, which took his life at age 41. Some of his most powerful passages meditate on the horror of cancer, which Mara compares to torture: "Both changed the meaning of the body. No longer the purveyor of pleasure, but instead a battleground." The book's backmatter includes Park's frank essay "I Had a 9 Percent Chance. Plus Hope," in which he discusses his fight with cancer. While not an uplifting read, Park's final novel hums with quiet importance and thwarted promise. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads