Saving the World : a Novel

Library Journal Review: Starred Review. A successful Latina novelist, 50-year-old Alma lives in rural Vermont with husband Richard, a manager for development projects in Third World countries. Alma is deeply, passionately in love with Richard, but she is also suffering from writer's block and severe depression; she simply can't get started on the Latino family saga she promised her agent and editor. Instead, she becomes obsessed with another story?that of Don Francisco Balmis, who from 1803 to 1810 traveled throughout the New World with orphan boys as live carriers to inoculate the citizens of New Spain against smallpox, and Do?a Isabel, who accompanied him to watch over the boys. Both are actual historical figures, but little is known about Do?a Isabel, and it is she around whom Alma weaves a novel. When Richard travels to her native Dominican Republic and is taken hostage at a green center he'd established there, Alma looks to her creation, Do?a Isabel, for courage. Alvarez's (In the Time of the Butterflies) descriptions of nature and character are both naturalistic and poetic, creating a psychological novel-within-a-novel that is intense and riveting. For all libraries.?Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, OR Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.