The Veins of the Ocean is Patricia Engel's third novel. Set in Miami, the Keys, Cuba and Colombia, the story follows Reina Castillo from a life of terrible routine to something less predictable, less safe and far more open to possibility. After her brother's death in prison, Reina leaves her mother and childhood home of Miami and moves to a small place in the Florida Keys. There she meets Nesto, a refugee from Cuba trying to find a way to be reunited with his children. Their friendship offers Reina something she did not believe she would ever have: a chance to live and to breathe freely.
Nesto's understanding of the ocean brings Reina closer to something that is fundamental to her living, to her life - the water is her balm, it is her refuge. Her travels to Colombia and Cuba to find her family and his give the story breadth and complication. Together, they learn more about survival and living than either had imagined they would.
I loved reading this book. It was quiet, well-organized, surprising and in some ways a relief. Generally speaking, men are offered stories of redemption and women get stories of healing. In this book, it is the other way around. Reina has done wrong and must find a way to live with it. Nesto is living with the pain of separation from the people that he loves and must find a way to carry on for them.
Reina is a working woman. She does nails for a living - customer service work that is paid hourly and has high expectations for performance. Her work is easy enough to find, but the novel does not trivialize or romanticize it. Throughout the book there is little in the way of decoration or unearned romance. Everything is fairly sharp, even the warmth of the ocean air when Reina finally moves to her little perfect cabin near the beach. Nesto brings her awareness out of the walls of her youth and her brother's prison cell to something less definable, more magical. He tells her stories of the spirits of ocean, and she eventually does open her heart and her mind to the possibilities.
The thing that troubles me is something that is troubling in depictions of women in general - they always need saving. Yes, her distress is different, and yes the love story is not at all gooey, and yes she is her own person entirely and yet ...
The barricaded woman is more and more apparent of late. She is socially awkward, abandoned, terrified, home during war, trapped in a world that hates her, etc. She has so many stories. Someday, perhaps, the story will be of healthy solace in that quiet place, rather than basic survival.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we will no longer be the subject of some man's heroism.
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