#Friday56 & #BookBeginnings: Perla

For Book Beginnings:

Some things are impossible for the mind to behold. So listen, if you can, with your whole being. The story pushes and demands to be told, here, now, with you so close and the past even closer, breathing at the napes of our necks.

- p. 3

For Friday 56:

Now she looks him right in the eyes and the room goes bright, too bright, and something in her stare slices him open, the ease is gone and the disgust is back and there is something else, too, something new that fills him with confusion.

- p. 56

About Perla by Carolina de Robertis*: A coming-of-age story, based on a recent shocking chapter of Argentine history, about a young woman who makes a devastating discovery about her origins with the help of an enigmatic houseguest. Perla Correa grew up a privileged only child in Buenos Aires, with a cold, polished mother and a straitlaced naval officer father, whose profession she learned early on not to disclose in a country still reeling from the abuses perpetrated by the deposed military dictatorship. Perla understands that her parents were on the wrong side of the conflict, but her love for her papá is unconditional. But when Perla is startled by an uninvited visitor, she begins a journey that will force her to confront the unease she has suppressed all her life, and to make a wrenching decision about who she is, and who she will become.

***

I am revisiting an old favourite. You can find out why I loved this so much in my review, written four years ago! Hint: it has shades of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

*Affiliate link

Have you revisited any old favourites lately?