Curbside Splendor Press

REVIEW BY MELISSA OLIVEIRA

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Vanessa Blakeslee prefaces her remarkable debut novel, Juventud, with a quote by Gabriel García Márquez: “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” It’s fitting, then, that memory casts such a long shadow over the events of this coming-of-age narrative that opens amid the turbulence and uncertainty of late-1990s Colombia. Memory and forgetting shape this narrative, however, and it is in in this tumultuous historical moment that we first meet our fifteen-year-old narrator, Mercedes: a Colombia after the takedown of Pablo Escobar, where regular citizens are caught between rivaling FARC, ELN and paramilitary forces, a deeply corrupt government, and a socially activist Church. Juventud covers all the usual trials of the coming-of-age story, but the expertly- rendered world and clever, strong-willed narrator make this novel snap with tension.

While hijackings, kidnappings, and desperate desplazados all belong to Juventud’s setting, Mercedes, the half-American only child of a sugarcane farmer named Diego, is largely protected from the violence at first. News reports babble in the background of her home, a bucolic hacienda near Cali de Santiago, and early in the novel she witnesses a bus hijacking while being driven home from her private day school in town. Yet Mercedes is a member of the small affluent class whose wealth is concentrated behind well-guarded gates. Diego would like to send his daughter away to boarding school in the United States, where her mother lives and where Mercedes will be safe.

Nevertheless, when Mercedes meets Manuel, a passionate social activist with a great talent for guitar, her country’s problems begin to take on a horrifying solidity around her despite her father’s efforts to keep her insulated from danger. Mercedes’s instinct is that Diego is also keeping her from some fundamental truths about the past, including the reason for her mother’s abandonment and Diego’s own place in Colombia’s recent history. Manuel offers a few answers about Diego and many opportunities to break out of the strictly defined role of obedient daughter. As Mercedes and Manuel begin to fall in love, Mercedes increases her own involvement with Manuel’s activist youth group, La Maria Juventud. Meanwhile, back on the farm, Diego decides to allow for some of the country’s many displaced people to camp on a plot of land. As Diego pushes her to leave Colombia, Mercedes digs in, reinvesting in her birth country by attending peace rallies in an environment that is increasingly hostile, if not deadly, to social activists.

Yet here, about halfway through the novel, Juventud expands beyond the scope of a romantic novel about youth. At its heart is a mystery story of sorts — a terrible personal tragedy that befalls Mercedes, whose solution is interwoven not only with her own family history, but with that of her country. Mercedes has a keen and curious mind, and one of the joys of this novel is seeing her investigative bent assert itself after the youthful naiveté falls away. Mercedes’s own family history, like that of Colombia, is patchy and marred by trauma, and even so both are confronted with the task of constructing an identity and a coherent story with what facts they do possess. From this point, the novel’s scope ranges widely as Mercedes immigrates to the United States, tries to connect with her mother, and makes her home among family members who are also strangers. The story brings us far and wide, to suburban Florida, academic Berkeley, Washington DC, and even an Israel that reminds her all too much of the Colombia she left. Through all of it, Mercedes excavates personal memory and official history, truth and lies and everything in between.

Juventud is a solid coming-of-age story with a refreshingly fleshed-out female narrator. Admittedly, the strongest parts are in the first two-thirds of the novel, but the somewhat sagging tension in the final act is forgivable in the face of such a well-rendered novel of memory and history in Latin America. Even through the most heavily plot-driven sections in the first half of the novel, I admired Blakeslee’s close eye for the little details of life and character: the sweet corn and hot grease of the street arepas Mercedes loves, the telling detail she notices on a knockoff designer handbag, the quiet way in which she notes when father has had a woman stay overnight. The novel is well done and wonderfully researched on the whole, and it makes for an enjoyable read. Readers who enjoy novels of Latin American history, engaging female leads and coming-of-age stories should all enjoy Juventud.