Jesse Monteagudo: This review was originally published in Gay Today (3/31/03). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.badpuppy.com online. Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his life partner. You can write to him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online.
Zoé Valdés is one of the bright lights of Cuban literature today. Dear First Love is a brilliant if somewhat confusing novel of lesbian love set in revolutionary Cuba of the 1970's. As a young girl, Danae is sent with other teens to the Cuban countryside, to do “volunteer” work in the fields. There she meets the enigmatic Tierra Fortuna, the daughter of a peasant family whose constant inbreeding led to a generation of deformed children. This does not stop Danae from enjoying “first love” with Tierra Fortuna, an idyll that ends with Danae's return to Havana. Years later, now married and a mother, Danae tries to flee her confined surroundings and insensitive husband, return to the country, and find Tierra Fortuna. If the reader does not mind the weird characters and the even weirder inanimate objects - who often serve as narrators - he or she will learn much from “Dear First Loves” about Castro's Cuba, youthful idealism, mid-life crises and, of course, first love.
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