Customer Reviews

Dear First Love: A Novel

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Writing a novel about present day Havana where Danae, a dissatisfied housewife and mother leaves her husband to find her first love, is a great idea. Telling the story from various inanimate objects is a clever way to tell the story from an omniscient narrator. But something gets lost in the process and Valdes takes just a bit too long to tell us their love story. I was able to read 100 pages in one sitting, but I was unable to finish it.

I must agree wholeheartedly with the previous review of this book. I bought this book on the clearance table at Barnes & Noble and was intrigued by the premise of this story about a girl named Danae from Havana who met her first love at a summer camp when she was a teen. Her first love was a woman (Tierra Fortuna Munda) and she only spent that brief summer with her. Danae then went on to marry a man and have children. By the time she's in her 40's she's miserable with the state of her life and leaves to find Tierra again. I thought this story would be really interesting because of the love story set in a repressive society like Cuba.
I'm a big reader and am very open to all types of fiction but I honestly can say this was the worst book I've read in recent memory. Unfortunately I'm the type who starts a book and has to finish it no matter what and usually there's something redeeming by the end. This book took me so long to plow through! The 3 things I disliked most about this book are: 1) the author went on much too long with useless description and included too many song lyrics, 2) the narrator changes with each chapter which in and of itself isn't bad but the narrators here included a suitcase, a ceiba tree, a royal palm, a manatee, and "the sensitive light of the city"(....), and 3) there were WAAAYYYYY too many excessively descriptive references to bodily functions, unclean living conditions, and all of the characters' particular physical quirks/deformities (I won't share any details but the things I read in this book turned my stomach more than once!). I never throw books away but this one may end up in the trash so no one else will make the same mistake I did.