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The Veins of the Ocean
Marines listed this as one of her favorites on episode 147 of WSIRN. Reina Castillo has spent the last few years revolving her life around visiting her older brother in prison. She spends a lot of time thinking about him and the impact of what sent him to prison. When her brother dies suddenly while in prison, she's released from the cycle. She picks up her life and she moves to the Florida Keys on a whim. There she encounters a community and goes on a journey of coming to terms with what her brother did, her role in what he did, and finding out what her life is going to be from now on. Marines says Patricia Engel is a brilliant writer and The Veins of the Ocean is beautifully written, dealing heavily with the ocean as symbol for healing.
About the Book
Publisher’s description:
In this “profound, daring” tale of loss and faith, a woman haunted by tragedy begins to find healing in the waters—and love—that surround her (San Francisco Chronicle).
Reina Castillo’s beloved brother has been sentenced to death for an unthinkable crime that shocked the community—and Reina secretly blames herself. Devastated and grieving, Reina moves to a quiet enclave in the Florida Keys seeking anonymity and a new start, and meets Nesto Cadena, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana.
Inspired by Nesto’s love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her, as well as its role in her family’s troubled history. Against a vibrant coastal backdrop that ranges from Miami to Cartagena, Colombia, author Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured souls finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world—and in one another.
“This is a writer who understands that exile can be as much an emotional state as a geographical one, that the agony of leaving tugs against the agony of being left behind. . . . To immerse oneself in Engel’s prose is to surrender to a seductive embrace, a hypnotic beauty that mingles submersion with submission.” —The New York Times Book Review
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