Inheriting Our Names: an Imagined True Memoir of Spain's Pact of Forgetting

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INHERITING OUR NAMES is an astonishing, richly layered, and profoundly rewarding read. In this "imagined true memoir,” C. Vargas McPherson showers her readers with gifts, including a compelling, multi-generational saga with the sweep of Isabel Allende’s work, sharply drawn and tenderly portrayed characters with familial relationships as rich and deep as those conjured by Amy Tan, descriptions of Seville that let the reader synesthetically experience that city of almost a century ago as vividly as Angela’s Ashes does for Limerick of the 1930’s, the pageantry and mysticism of devout Catholicism equaling Garcia-Marquez, and a primer on the Spanish Civil War, that little understood precursor to World War II that foreshadows so much of our current political landscape. So much more than a simple sum of its ingredients, this story is an intimate and compassionate observation of families coping with grief, death, and the loss of children. It is a reckoning on the politics of war-ravaged cultures and the human tolls imposed on them. It contains unspeakably transcendent moments, and all of it is embroidered in lyrical, exquisite prose.