Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Your Heart My Sky

 Tell me a story... about the Special Period in Times of Peace


Your Heart My Sky by Margarita Engle

Published date: March 23, 2021

Date read: September 4, 2021


After the Soviet Union fell, Cuba lost their aid, resulting in el periodo especial en tiempos de paz, or the special period in times of peace. This is what the government called these years in the 1990s - to the citizens of Cuba, it was merely a time of starvation and isolation. Many citizens fled into the ocean, hoping against the odds that they would survive and make it to Florida. Others illegally scavenged the land and the sea, bought what little food there was on the black market, or attempted to grow their own vegetables (also illegal). In their small village, Liana and Amado refuse to report for their summer of "voluntary" farm labor, and instead opt to stay at home, risking the repercussions, to scavenge and attempt to provide for their families. When these two teenagers meet and begin to fall in love, they must decide together the best way to survive el periodo especial. A novel in verse.

This novel, told all in verse, uses these two young people and (oddly enough) a dog - I know, it's weird, but go with it - to tell the story of Cubans during the 1990s. The characters of Liana and Amado are fictional, but the backstory is all based on truth.

I was alive during this time - when the Soviet Union fell in 1991 I was 9 years old. Not exactly watching the news every night, but I was in school. And after all of my years of schooling following this period, I had never heard of the Special Period in Times of Peace until picking up this book. I knew that Cuba was basically our enemy in the 90s, but that was it. This book, while already being relatively short (only 224 pages) and told in verse, is able to pack a lot of information about this time in Cuba in a very small amount of words. It's powerful and a little heartbreaking, and it honestly makes me a little bit ashamed that I wasn't even aware of it before now.  

The main characters were well-written and mostly enjoyable. For main characters, they were a little underdeveloped, but I feel that was because the time period was really more important than the characters - they were being used to tell the story of all Cubans, so their individual stories were not as interesting. (Does that make sense?) This isn't to say that I didn't like them or their love story. Just that if you're going into this book looking for a love story, you're going to be disappointed, because it really isn't the point of this book.

Overall, I highly recommend this book. It's an easy read, language-wise, although a very difficult read, subject-wise. But if you, like me, were completely unfamiliar with this period before this book, it's a really fascinating read. I love learning new things through fiction, and in that sense, this book really didn't disappoint. 

Rating: 4/5 stars

Trigger warning: starvation

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