![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This pattern of shifts, abrupt, unexpected change, doors to homelands opening and closing, the young Margarita comes to understand, goes back for generations: She is cut off from her extended family, the melody of her second language, the “crocodile-shaped” country she loves. Then in April 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion occurs and she cannot return to Cuba. The child in this memoir is a bird, lifted each year from her home in California to Cuba, where she spends blissful summers. Old women love fresh air, but they are also Afraid of aires, a word that can be a whoosh of refreshing sky breath, or it can mean dangerous spirits. Sketches, signs and gestures had to substitute for words.”Īfter this opening the book moves into verse, and a generation coming of age on Snapchat and Instagram will find the power Engle is able to pack into each exquisite phrase to be deeply satisfying: ![]() “They were standing on the terrace of an art school in an elegant palace now known as the Museo Romántico, the Romantic Museum.” Since her Cuban mother and American father did not speak the same language, they “communicated by passing drawings back and forth, like children in the back of a classroom. . . “When my parents met, it was love at first sight,” Engle writes. From the very first sentence, Margarita Engle’s memoir “Enchanted Air” takes wing. ![]()
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