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  • The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist by Margarita Engle
  • Karen Coats
Engle, Margarita. The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist. Harcourt, 2013. [194p]. ISBN 978-0-547-80743-0 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6–9.

Award-winning verse novelist Engle turns her attention to the life and writings of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the nineteenth-century feminist and abolitionist author. Familiarly known as Tula, Avellaneda, born to a wealthy family in Cuba, had a rebellious, restless nature and a desperate love for poetry and stories. Engle follows Tula from 1827, when she was thirteen and on the brink of being settled into an arranged marriage, to 1836, when she arrives with her family in Spain and begins her literary career. During those early years, Tula reads and spins tales of vampires and ghosts while she develops strong views about the enslavement of people, including women forced into loveless marriages. Refusing to marry the man her stepfather has chosen for her, she is sent away to the country, where her fertile imagination grows and the seeds for her first and best-known novel, Sab, are sown. Engle provides multiple perspectives on Tula’s influences by giving voice to her mother, her brother, and the family cook, as well as inventing voices for the fictional characters of Sab, who may have been inspired by actual people. In these poems, their longings for freedom, their fears, their loves, and their heartaches are elegantly crafted through images that make the island of Cuba and its people vividly real and connect them to the hearts of contemporary readers. Particularly effective are the voices of Caridad, the cook, who both inspires and is inspired by Tula’s fearlessness, and Manuel, who escorts his sister to secret readings even when he knows that her love for abolitionist poetry could get the entire family arrested and even executed. Readers who never knew the power of poetry will be inspired by [End Page 294] both the story and the verse in which it is told. An historical note, bibliography, and samples of Avellaneda’s writings (in Spanish and in translation) are included.

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