Naturally, my interest was piqued when a copy of “After the Hurricane” (William Morrow, $27.99) crossed my desk. Puerto Rico is like a second home to me. I lived in San Juan during my teenage years, and I forged lifelong friendships there. I frequently go back, most recently in March, and I have written about it often. The new novel by Leah Franqui takes place on the island.
“After the Hurricane” is the first novel I’ve read set in modern-day Puerto Rico, and I was captivated from the first page. But it’s not just the setting that gripped me. Franqui’s characters are finely drawn and grounded in family dynamics that are highly relatable, plus she sets up an engrossing quest that drives the narrative. And without getting heavy-handed, she illustrates how the island’s current struggles are rooted in its colonial history.
At the center of her story is Elena Vega, a woman in her early 30s who works for a property management firm in Brooklyn, but she’s a historian at heart and has a graduate degree from NYU to prove it. Born and raised in the States by a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father, she has vague memories of visiting her father’s family on the island as a child and hasn’t been back in a decade.
But when her father, Santiago, goes missing a few months after Hurricane Maria barrels across the island killing more than 3,000 people and destroying the power grid, Elena returns to Puerto Rico to find him.
Santiago is an enigmatic man. Once a successful lawyer, his mental state has become impaired by untreated bipolar disorder and excessive alcohol consumption. Six years earlier, he had split from Elena’s mother and returned to Puerto Rico, taking up residence in the colonial home they’d bought and renovated in Viejo San Juan. Elena’s communications with him have been spotty ever since.
In Puerto Rico, Elena reconnects with family members, meeting some she’d never known before, and she crisscrosses the ravaged island searching for her father. But she isn’t just looking for his physical being; she’s searching for clues to who he is and how he got to be that way.
Braided through Elena’s story are chapters told from Santiago’s point of view that provide some answers. As she conducts her search, Elena becomes engrossed in a blog that provides historical context and helps explain how the island — and Santiago, to a certain degree — came to be the way it is.
Franqui, 35, a Midtown resident working on her Ph.D. in creative writing at Georgia State University, shares similarities with Elena Vega. She’s also in her 30s, highly-educated, with a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father with whom she has a complicated relationship. She, too, was born in the States but spent her childhood visiting the island. And they both grapple with what it means to be Puerto Rican.
“Is it a nationality? A cultural identity? A piece of both?” Elena wonders. “Is it defined by skin tone or language or food or religion or how good an oversize T-shirt spray-painted with the Puerto Rican flag looks on her body?”
A native of Philadelphia, Franqui started her career writing plays and screenplays, but these days she enjoys the luxury novels afford her to expound on her ideas.
“When I started writing novels, I found I could write more and I always have so much to say, it felt more like myself,” she said.
“After the Hurricane” has been percolating in Franqui’s brain for a while.
“I’ve written about Puerto Rico in my theatrical work for a long time … This book specifically is a story that I’ve tried to tell in a play and in a screenplay,” she said. “I have a complicated relationship with my father and, therefore, with Puerto Rico — with being Puerto Rican … I think this is a story I wanted to tell and tried to tell in the past, and it continued to evolve like my relationship with my father does.”
Her first novel, published in 2018, was “America for Beginners” about an upper-class Indian woman who joins a tour group on a trip to California to discover what became of her son. Along the way she bonds with the tour guide and a fellow traveler, an aspirational actress.
She followed that up with “Mother Land” (2020), about a woman who gives up her life in New York to move to Mumbai with her Indian-born husband. Their newly wedded bliss is disrupted when her strong-willed mother-in-law moves in. It, too, has roots in Franqui’s life; she lived with her husband in Mumbai for six years before moving to Atlanta in July 2021.
Judging from her output so far, Franqui has a keen interest in exploring the intersection of different cultures.
“I come from a line of people who are culturally mixed … I grew up around people with culturally different backgrounds, and I ended up marrying someone from India and moving to India and adapting in those ways,” she said. “In terms of my childhood and adolescence and formative experience as a person, I felt culturally mixed — both ‘of’ and ‘other.’ And in my marriage, I felt both ‘of’ and ‘other.’”
Those experiences have given Franqui a unique perspective on life from a vantage point she described as “an incredibly beautiful and fruitful place to forge identity and understand culture, and a lonely one.”
Either way, it’s a place ripe with potential for a writer who has her sights set on “that constant clash between the way you’ve been raised to understand the world and the way the world is in front of you.”
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Contact her at svanatten@ajc.com and follow her on Twitter at @svanatten.
