This book was heartbreaking from the start, but I was super invested in the sisters and their stories! I love books about women surviving what is thrown their way. This is a super unique read and I enjoyed learning about parts of history I didn’t know about before!

This book is an emotional journey that will leave you fully satisfied. It tells the story of two sisters from Izalco, El Salvador, whose lives resonate with those of many Latin American women. Though it’s fiction, it feels deeply real.

The story unfolds in a unique way: the ghosts of their chosen sisters, who died in a tragic event, serve as the narrators (more or less). It’s a blend of laughter, tears, and everything in between.

Although the pace is slow, every page is worth savoring. I recommend taking the time to read it carefully to connect deeply with the characters and their stories. A book that truly leaves a mark!

A huge thanks to NetGalley for providing an electronic copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Plot: ⭐⭐⭐ 3
Characters: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4
Relationships: ⭐⭐⭐3
World-building: ⭐⭐⭐⭐4
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 3.5

Este libro es un viaje emocional que no te dejará buscando más. Narra la vida de dos hermanas de Izalco, El Salvador, cuyas historias resuenan con las de muchas mujeres latinoamericanas. Aunque es ficción, se siente profundamente real.

La historia se despliega de una manera única: los fantasmas de sus hermanas elegidas, quienes murieron en un trágico evento, son las narradoras (más o menos). Es una mezcla de risas, lágrimas y todo lo que hay en medio.

Aunque el ritmo es pausado, cada página merece ser saboreada. Te recomiendo leerlo con tiempo y atención para conectar profundamente con los personajes y sus historias. ¡Un libro que realmente deja huella!

Un enorme agradecimiento a NetGalley por una copia electrónica de este libro a cambio de mi honesta reseña.

Trama: ⭐⭐⭐ 3
Personajes: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4
Relaciones: ⭐⭐⭐ 3
Construcción del mundo: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4
En general: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 3.5

This was a unique work of historical fiction centered on two sisters, Consuelo and Graciela, who hail from a small community on a Volcano in El Salvador but are torn apart by a cruel dictator and his whims. From covering the real life event of The Massacre to the Vichy regime and Nazi control of France during WWII, Gina Maria Balibrera crafts a sweeping tale of indigenous history, loss, sisterhood, and survivorship.

I found Part One of the book highly informative as it focused on a tragic portion of El Salvadoran history and political climate with which I was unfamiliar. I thought the author weaved Consuela's and Graciela’s storylines in an interesting and engaging way here as well. As the book progressed, I appreciated witnessing the growth Graciela undergoes as her brilliance, financial savviness, and resourcefulness shine through amidst all the hardships she faces once she flees her home country. On the contrary, Consuelo’s arc felt a bit underdeveloped and I would have liked to see greater depth in her character. This became even more evident with the ending, which I thought was rushed and detracted the focus from the sisters. Lastly, I found the narrative interjections somewhat disruptive to the flow of the story, although I acknowledge that they offered comedic relief in juxtaposition to the devastating circumstances surrounding the two women and their loved ones. I believe the story would have been just as, if not more, compelling for me without that particular narrative choice.

With all that being said, this was still an interesting novel that I recommend to readers who enjoy learning about a forgotten period in history, marginalized communities, language, and culture with elements of magical realism.

3.5 stars!

Thank you @netgalley and Knopf, Pantheon, and Vintage catalog for an e-ARC of The Volcano Daughters in exchange for my honest review.
#TheVolcanoDaughters #NetGalley

The lives of two sisters’ survival told before and after ‘La Matanza’, the genocidal massacre in El Salvador in 1932, through the ghosts of their deceased friends and sisters of heart who were massacred in the genocide. Mythology is woven throughout their stories and the ghost narrators leave their opinions as well. Creatively written, evoking emotions across the spectrum, The Volcano Daughters gives voice to those who can no longer tell their history and truth.

Set in El Salvador starting in the 1800's, the writing in the book was beautiful. The book spans the lives of two indigenous sisters who unwillingly work for the dictator. Once they are able to flee, their lives take separate paths. This wasn't the right book for me, perhaps because of the magical realism, but I'm sure many readers will really appreciate it.

I was intrigued to read and learn about the brutal history of a race massacre in El Salvador. The first half of the book wove language, culture, and politics to tell the story of Consuelo and Graciela, sisters taken from their volcano home to live on eggshells in the city.
The second half of the book fell apart for me. Wandering characters with wandering storylines didn't lend to depth or interest. The tone became erratic and included the ponderings of ghosts who forced action.
I'm glad I finished but struggled to get there.

This book follows two Indigenous women in El Salvador as they are forcibly taken from their community and navigate the rest of the world during their lives in the 1920s-1940s. It's a beautiful saga with unique points of view, as well as engrossing prose and story overall. I definitely recommend for fans of literary historical fiction. A huge thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of an eARC in exchange for my review!

The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera is an epic debut novel that spans decades in El Salvador and follows two sisters from a coffee plantation near a volcano to the capital, San Salvador. In a haunting and often gripping story, Balibrera shows how personal lives are impacted by and intertwined with history in this well-researched book. I loved the author’s use of fantasy and myth fused with history as well as incorporating four deceased women as guides. She takes us into a dark chapter of El Salvador’s history with a hatred and massacre of indigenous people. There are also scenes of El Salvador’s breathtaking beauty as well as the Golden Age of Hollywood and Paris during World War II in this epic debut. Thank you to Pantheon and NetGalley for the eARC. Recommended. I look forward to more from Gina Maria Balibrera after this powerful debut.

Perhaps the best way to summarize this novel is to just say, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of course, this doesn’t span a century and the narrating ghosts make sure neither the MCs or you are ever alone. But I think you get the point: sweeping magical realism set in the jungles and towns of Latin America - in this case, El Salvador.

It takes about fifty pages to figure out the main characters: Consuelo and Graciela. We learn their story from their friends who are, um…dead. And that’s not a spoiler, since in the very first chapter, they tell us they’re dead, of some horrible political massacre. It’s set in a series of small towns, a coffee economy, on the side of a volcano. Eventually, it moves to California and Paris.

Tremendous description here. Wow, what a setting! The author conveys both the danger and beauty of the jungle. Also, the voices are quite poetic. There’s nothing wrong with the occasional f-bomb here, since the interactions between characters are emotional, meaningful, and full of love. Ghosts are meant to be haunting, and these girls are experts.

Now, if you love magic (and not the romantasy kind), you’ll be in heaven (or wherever the ghosts are). There are named spirits that actually show up and swirl around the main characters. The General does something bad, and gets chased by a spectral legend. The dead girls visit the living, right when they needed it. Very cool.

However…

This is meant to be read slowly. And that’s not what I do. I prefer to be entertained, told a story I can easily follow. The first fifty pages here did the opposite. It was hard to understand who the narrators were. The timeline flies all over. The claims to be dead threw me off. There’s basically no direction. Again, beautifully described, but if you want to follow what’s happening, you need to read paragraphs over and over. The narrator will be telling us about Socorrito, but then digress into a story about a spirit, and not come back to the original story. This made it the writing less like Gabriel García Márquez and more like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace And certainly not Isabel Allende. Things just didn’t connect. For me, at least.

It gets better when Consuelo and Graciela meet in the General's home. Better still when they escape. But even there, the lack of a linear plot wrought havoc on my attention span. I admit, I skimmed the ending.

Also, have your Spanish-English dictionary handy. I have a rusty grip on the language, and even I had to Google translate a few words. In fact, the author goes full phrases in the language without offering a translation. I can see those who don’t speak or understand the language getting rather annoyed.

But that’s how magical realism goes. Usually. 100 Years remains one of my favorites, but the plot there is more traditional. It’s meant to flit in and out of consciousness, back and forth through time, circling what’s real and what’s not. The author does a good job of taking us to her worlds, both real and imagined. Telling where, when, and why we’re there, however, was a shortcoming.

I recommend this: recognize that I’m the wrong person to review this kind of book. My opinions probably ignore the features that make this book great. I could pick out things I like, but saying it’s bad based on my aversion of the genre just isn’t fair.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador’s brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren’t yet done telling their stories.

There's a dictatorship, genocide, refugee resettlement in the States, and a little bit of magic. What a combo, right? So much happened in this book. It follows the story of two daughters who get separated at birth and reconnect multiple times. The first part of the book they are both in El Salvador and both have a connection to the dictator, the General. Eventually, the General goes after the girls village and murders everyone in it. The girls survive and then escape (separately) to the United States. The second part of the book is their journey after escaping El Salvador. The magical piece is all of their friends are haunting them throughout their lives and the story is from their perspective with their commentary as ghosts.

This book wasn't for me. It was very graphic and disturbing and was very long. I know this book is for some people based on reviews, but it wasn't for me. The Spanish cultural barrier was hard for me to overcome. There was a lot of Spanish words used throughout and I wish there was some translation for some words - I definitely missed the meaning of some parts because of the language barrier.

My rating: 2 stars

Thank you NetGalley and Pantheon for the free e-book in exchange for an honest review.

Evocative and captivating!

This book is an excellent story woven through with Salvadoran mythology that continuously pulls you right in! It is a book that demands to be read, and you will want time to stop so you can simply keep reading. Written with lots of Spanglish moments, I couldn't help but enjoy the way this book was constructed. Told from the perspectives of four ghosts, whose personalities transcend the pages, the story molds into an unforgettable tale that paints the picture of political turmoil and genocide, and how that affects the lives of these girls as we follow Graciela and Consuelo.

The author truly created an incredible story, and it's hard to find the words to really describe how great this book is. This is the kind of book you'd want to keep on hand forever.

This is a tale of sisterhood, colonization, survival, immigration, war, corruption, hope, love, and El Salvadoran mythology woven into an epic story beautifully written. The Spanish interspersed in the writing was both powerful and, for someone who only knows bits of the language like me, complicated. This, along with the eloquent literary repetitiveness, resulted in it taking me a lot longer to read this book than my usual. I wanted it to end, but was really invested in the characters so wanted to see how their lives unfolded. This is definitely a work to read when you have time to put it down and process before picking it back up again. It is an important contribution to new perspectives on 20th century colonization and the reverberating destruction it has caused to indigenous peoples as a group and individuals.

Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor: Pantheon, Netgalley, and the author for early access to this powerful work.

Haunting. Devastating. Beautiful. Those are three words I'd use to describe "The Volcano Daughters".

You're transported back in time to the coffee plantations of El Salvador in the heart of volcano country. Through the voices of the dead, you're told the stories of Graciela and Consuelo, two sisters who were torn apart and brought back time and time again. At four years old, Consuelo was ripped from her village by her father and brought up in the capital. While she lived a luxurious life, Graciela was being raised to work. The death of their father brings Graciela to the capital where she's taken from her mother and forced to serve as the General's medium. Together, Graciela and Consuelo grow and plan an escape before tragedy stops them. Their lives get separated, but they're guided by the ghosts of their friends as they each seek out new lives.

Gina María Balibrera has illustrated the world in the 1920's and 30's through the eyes of Salvadorans, painting a picture of the challenges this culture faced. Weaved throughout is a message that we can look to our past to learn how to move forward in the future. Maybe we're not guided by the voices of the dead, but we can create a better world by telling these stories.

Balibrera's prose is beautiful and enchants you from the very first page. It immerses you into the emotions which run high throughout. Our characters face love and loss and grief. Consuelo and Graciela navigate those emotions differently as a result of their different upbringing, creating two vastly different, and equally enthralling, stories.

I'm so grateful to NetGalley and Pantheon for the opportunity to read an e-galley in exchange for an honest review!

The plot was very well thought out. I was impressed with how many historical events and variety of people within the story. The main characters were very interesting to read about. The writing was absolutely heart wrenching at times. I think the author’s style is very unique.

However, I could not stand the pace of the first part. It was way too slow for me. I almost quit reading at least two times. For me, part one felt too much like rambling and the main character really didn’t have the freedom to choose their actions. The magical realism aspects really didn’t come in to play until the later parts too.

Part two was infinitely more interesting where the main characters actually got to choose what to do. This is when I really started to care for the characters. Part three was a little bit difficult to get through emotionally, but I did enjoy how much the author included magical realism in this part. I enjoyed many aspects of the book, but overall, I’m not sure if the unique characteristics of the book outcompete the slow pacing and emotional toll.

Gina María Balibrera's sweeping, moving debut novel The Volcano Daughters follows two sisters, Consuelo and Graciela, through their tumultuous lives in El Salvador and beyond. The novel also uses a Greek chorus-style voice of four girls who didn't survive, and instead follow the two sisters on their journey. Balibrera's writing is beautiful and the narrative is ambitious, covering many years and places as the sisters flee El Salvador for safety and new lives while carrying the past with them. While the narrators often enrich the story, the jumps in style and perspective made it confusing to read at times and made this more challenging to get into. The novel also feels a bit too long and drags at point, and likely could have been tightened up and trimimed. Balibrera is clearly talented, though, so I'm curious what else she will write.

The Volcano Daughters by Gina Maria Baliberera follows two sisters and their journeys from rural El Salvador after the turn of the nineteenth century to their ultimate home and reconnection in the United States. They experience joy, terror, sorrow, and ambition as they deal with kidnappings, assaults, genocide, relationships, motherhood, friendship, and more.

This well-written debut novel is mainly focused on remaining true to yourself, even when you are not entirely sure what that means, and in the face of both every day life and extraordinary circumstances. The Greek Chorus style additions to the main narrative were great in adding context, history and sometimes a lighter moment. It was a wonderful way to illustrate how we carry the memories, experiences and attitudes of the past along with us to influence how we react to situations in the present. My only small complaint is that the second half seemed to meander more than needed and dragged the pacing down in a few places.

Overall, this is a strong, original start to the author’s novel-writing career, and I look forward to reading more from her.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for providing the digital ARC.

4 stars

The formatting made this way too complicated to read. Perhaps I will try this book again , but in a print format, because the premise seems interesting.

DNF at 5%.

I can totally see the appeal of this book to others but unfortunately the writing style is just not it for me. I’m having trouble keeping track of who is speaking about what, and the switching between Spanish and English multiple times per sentence is throwing me off. I wish I enjoyed the writing a bit more because I was excited about this storyline and so think overall the writing sounds beautiful, but is just confusing.

The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera is a powerful and evocative debut novel that masterfully intertwines themes of family, heritage, and resilience against a vibrant and tumultuous backdrop. Set in El Salvador, the story follows two sisters, Graciela and Consuelo, who are separated at a young age and later reunite under extraordinary circumstances.

Balibrera’s storytelling is both poetic and visceral, drawing readers into the lives of her richly developed characters. The narrative is endlessly surprising and vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life and historical depth. The author skillfully weaves Spanish words and phrases throughout the novel, adding authenticity and a deeper connection to the cultural setting.

The novel’s strength lies in its ability to blend historical fiction with elements of magical realism, creating a unique and immersive reading experience. The depiction of the sisters’ journey from the shadow of a brutal dictator to their flight across the globe is both heart-wrenching and inspiring.

While the pacing can be uneven at times, and some readers might find the interwoven Spanish challenging, these aspects do not detract significantly from the overall impact of the story. The Volcano Daughters is a testament to the enduring power of memory, community, and the unbreakable bond of sisterhood.

Overall, this novel is a dazzling accomplishment and a must-read for fans of historical fiction and magical realism. Highly recommended!

A sweeping, enchanting work of historical fiction and magical realism set around two sisters from El Salvador. It's a heartbreaking story full of violence, grief, and trauma, but also full of joy, creativity, and hope. I love the unique narrative voice of the story and the different corners of history the characters find themselves in. The second half of the book was faster paced and more compelling for me than the first, so if you find yourself thinking about quitting, I recommend sticking around!