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Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
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Captain of the Sleepers.
Montero, Mayra (author).
Sept. 2005. 181p. Farrar, hardcover, $22 (0-374-11882-5).
REVIEW.
First published September 1, 2005 (Booklist).
Montero charts the chilling undercurrents of steamy Caribbean life in novels notable for their lyrical intensity and mystery, eroticism and social acumen. Here, she writes of Puerto Rico as the ill-fated nationalist movement comes undone in 1950 and the U.S. military conducts practice bombing runs in preparation for the Korean War. Montero uses a classic flashback frame as Andres, then the 12-year-old son of a hotel owner, now meets with a man he has been estranged from for 50 years, J. T., a pilot young Andres called the Captain of the Sleepers because he ferried the dead. In his eighties and ill with cancer, J. T. wants to make things right. As J. T. tells his version of past events, Montero illuminates Andres’ boy-mind at work as he tries to understand his father’s involvement with the revolutionaries, J. T.’s role in their lives, and his mother’s early death. The result is a haunting tale of a small place overrun by a superpower and a small family shattered by big dreams of liberation and love, and the mythic alignment of sex and death. — Donna Seaman
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