Deeper Than the Ocean

Pulitzer-winning journalist Ojito (Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus) makes her fiction debut with an affecting parallel narrative of two women, each exiled from their island home nearly a century apart. In 2019, 50-something Cuban American reporter Mara Dennis is assigned to cover the drowning of African refugees en route to the Canary Islands. The location triggers her fear of the ocean, which she’s had since she fled Cuba four decades earlier on a small boat. The past is dredged up in other ways, as Mara’s emotionally distant mother, Lina, asks her to obtain the birth certificate of her great-grandmother, Catalina, in Tenerife. Alternating chapters follow Catalina from her birth in the Canary Islands in 1900 through her tumultuous affair with a star-crossed lover, arranged marriage, and ill-fated voyage to Cuba aboard the steamship Valbanera, which is shipwrecked in a hurricane off Key West. Generations later, as Mara digs into Catalina’s life, she contends with a series of mysteries, including that Catalina’s name was missing from the Valbanera’s manifest for its final voyage. Ojito vividly portrays the two women’s struggles, and the dramatic story ends on a hopeful note as Mara attempts to resolve her feelings about the past and improve her relationship with Lina. This one’s tough to shake. (Nov.)