Coconuts for the Saints

by Debra Spark

A young woman who begins a love affair with an enigmatic widower consults his three daughters for answers when her questions about his lack of a love life before her are met with silence. "Spark writes like some pixillated offspring of a secret liaison between J.D. Salinger and Isabel Allende".--Steve Stern.

Genres: Fiction

1 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Debra Spark is the author of The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception that will be published in April 2012 by Four Way Books. She is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Good for the Jews. Spark edited the best-selling anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers and her popular lectures on writing are collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

Reviews

[Honore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was initially attracted to this book because I wanted to revisit the island I grew up on, Puerto Rico, and my second pull was that a love story with a blended family felt like a great summer beach read. The story did not disappoint, well maybe a little when it dipped into a 1700's diary for a brief respite, but then it pulled itself back and was lovely. The last two chapter were especially meaningful to me, as I could really relate to the sentiment that the family was left with.

[Michaela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the story interesting in that it was written in the 1990s and set in Puerto Rico in the 1970s.

[Jessie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overlapping stories from different characters' perspective as a woman enters the lives of teenage triplet girls and their quiet father. As the family adapts they sense a missing piece from their father/lover but allow themselves to be distracted by their respective minor dramas of loving, growing together, differentiate. Accidents, revelations, and betrayal ensue.

[Noreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting story in dealing with identity and fate.

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, beautifully told tale.

[Soren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. Some chapters were great, but around 2/3s of the way through it just went off the rails.