Gina Maria Balibrera’s debut novel, The Volcano Daughters, offers the epic early 20th-century tale of sisters Graciela and Consuelo, born into poverty and servitude on a coffee finca (plantation) on the side of a volcano in El Salvador.
In 1923, Graciela and her mother, Socorrito, are summoned to San Salvador for the funeral of the father that Graciela never knew: a peasant who rose to become the advisor to El Gran Pendejo, the strongman ruling El Salvador. There Graciela meets her sister, Consuelo, who was taken from the finca as a 4-year-old, and lives in luxury with her adoptive mother, Perlita. Soon, Graciela learns that El Gran Pendejo intends for her to advise him as her father did, though she’s only 9. Every morning Graciela is driven to the presidential palace, where she listens to the nonsense El Gran Pendejo spouts, repeating it back to him. Meanwhile, the teenage Consuelo, who failed at the same job, stays busy falling in love with her young art teacher.
That’s only the beginning of The Volcano Daughters, which spans 30 years and multiple settings, including Paris, San Francisco and Hollywood. As El Gran Pendejo’s pronouncements grow more bizarre, he lands on the idea of killing the country’s Indigenous people, who he claims are communists. The massacre that follows separates Graciela and Consuelo, as each flees the country thinking the other dead.
The Volcano Daughters is also a ghost story, as the ghosts of Graciela’s and Consuelo’s best friends from the finca—Lourdes, Maria, Cora and Lucia—share the novel’s first person-plural narration, sometimes disappearing into the story, other times butting in with commentary.
Because The Volcano Daughters covers so much ground (both literally and narratively), and has a large cast of characters, including the ghost narrators, parts of the story slip by almost too quickly for the reader to connect with them emotionally. Still, Balibrera brings a bravura, magical-realist style to this story of resilience and love through impossible circumstances.
With its depictions of the 1930s Hollywood scene and Paris art world, and its imaginative retelling of a difficult piece of Central American history, The Volcano Daughters stands out.