The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist

"So sorry that I am not / the sort of daughter / my mother can love," laments Tula. At thirteen, she wonders "how many slaves / Mamá will buy with the money / she gains by marrying me to / the highest bidder." Mamá herself twice thwarted her wealthy father by marrying for love; now, however, she schemes to regain her inheritance through her unwilling daughter. Tula's love is language -- the banned words of the poet Heredia "refusing to accept / the existence of slavery" and her own words, "I don't want to be a man, / just a woman / with a voice." Loosely based on the early life of the Cuban novelist and human rights advocate Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-73), this novel in verse follows Tula for the three years that take her into open rebellion and its first consequences; there's also a glimpse of her living independently, as a poet, seven years later. Tula's desperate need to write and her struggle for self-determination resemble that of Pablo Neruda in Pam Muñoz Ryan's splendid The Dreamer (rev. 3/10). Brief, lyrical observations from others -- Mamá, a beloved brother, the nuns who nurture Tula's creative gift -- add dimension to Tula's own voice and the nineteenth-century Cuban setting. "Words / can be as human / as people, / alive / with the breath / of compassion," says the eloquent former slave Caridad. In Engle's able hands, they are just that. A historical note sorts fact from fiction and samples Avellaneda's poetry. joanna rudge long