Why Belize?

by Rodney Nelsestuen

From Kirkus "Eileen Sologoski flees her old life in Michigan for a new life in Belize, though the weather-beaten seaside capital city is not
precisely as she imagined it would be. The 47-year-old woman left behind a husband, two nearly grown children, and a
teaching job in the middle of the school year, arriving in the country with little money and no employment prospects. She
rents a room for 50 dollars a month in the home of a Belizean man named Eduardo and his German wife, Kita. Like Eileen,
Kita is fleeing a troubled past, one she would prefer not to discuss. "You are here now," she advises Eileen. "Make a new
life for yourself." Eileen finds a job as a tour guide leading busloads of day-trippers to see the local Mayan ruins. She even
devises a new name for Lennie Solo. Lennie manages not to think too much about the life she left behind—her
husband James, her twin boys just starting college—when James' parents arrive in Belize City on a cruise ship.
Confronted with the judgmental presence of Edgar and Wilma Sologoski, Lennie is forced to consider the decisions that
brought her to Belize and what decisions might send her back home again. Nelsestuen has a musical sense of language,
his sentences capturing the rhythms of both the landscape and the people who move through it... the narrative manages to
depict midlife crisis in all its messy self-involvement."

216 pages, Paperback

Published June 10, 2025

Reviews

[Gary Nelsestuen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, this novel starts very far from Belize where Nelsestuen mines his background of growing up on a small farm in the Midwest and his career in the farm banking business to create a novel based on an all-too-common situation of intergenerational farm life where the second generation, immersed in the work that they love on this Michigan family farm, are oblivious to the reality that they are not partners in the enterprise and own nothing; they have spent their best years in a semi-feudal state. The novel deals with the messy ways that the various individuals deal with this truth that they discover in middle age and how one can never truly escape a past life. Along the way, inter-personal family dynamics, a troubled in-law status and even small-town banking add to the complexity of this tale.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the beautiful style of writing that made this book easy to just glide through the pages. The wonderful character descriptions and development inserted me directly into their lives. All the characters were assessing their lives, their disappointments and asking themselves what else is there for their life. This was an intergenerational tale that kept me guessing about the decisions for the characters futures. When I finished reading this book I felt like I was still in the story and these characters were living on in my mind. Beautiful writing and a great story!!