For Costa Rica, I read Where There Was Fire : A Novel by John Manuel Arias. I don’t always share the covers for the books I read, but let’s take a moment to admire this one:

Bravo to the cover designer! This cover perfectly captured the book’s energy, story, and themes. I’ve designed the covers for three of my four published books, and damn, I really need to hire a cover designer for the next one. (Although I have a feeling my next book will be published traditionally… just putting that vibe out into the Universe.)

Although Spanish is the official language of Costa Rica, this book was written in English; but the author used the inverted question mark (¿) in the dialogue to remind the reader that the character would have been speaking Spanish. In a comment on my TikTok post for this book, someone raised an objection:

Hi! I’m Costa Rican and I love this series but I wish you had done better research before choosing this as the book from my country. It wasn’t originally written in Spanish nor was it published here…

I see the point this TikToker was making, but I also stand by my choice. I’m on a quest to read a book by an author from every country in the world in alphabetical order, because my muse/inner voice/intuition would not stop nagging me to do this project. Since my muse is the instigator of this whole epic endeavor, I’m doing my best to lean into my intuition when I pick the book for each country. That means I’m not ticking off boxes of imaginary criteria to please the masses and critics. Instead, I’m listening to suggestions, reading tons of book descriptions, and then choosing the book that screams, “Me! Me! Me!” For Costa Rica, that was Where There Was Fire.

And I’m so glad I read this book!

It was lush and vibrant and saturated with magic. The story alternates between 1995 during an epic hurricane and 1968 when a banana plantation burnt to the ground. The third person narrative shifts amongst characters, both major and minor, in a way that deepens the reading experience (and makes me, as a writer, intensely jealous). John Manuel Arias is also a poet, and the way he chose words and manipulated language made my skin tingle.

This novel is in the tradition of magical realism, and I could tell Arias was influenced by Allende and Márquez, but he also owned the genre and made it his own. Towards the novel’s end, he even tipped his hat to Márquez in a description of San José:

A lottery ticket vendor whose wife has cancer smiles with every piece sold, every cólon that will go toward her treatment. A café owners named Shakespeare recites lines from The Comedy of Errors; his patrons munch on croissants with their eyes closed, content. A stout, devout woman flits from passerby to passerby, quoting the good book–not the Bible but One Hundred Years of Solitude, she says.

Where There was Fire pg. 264

What a lovely ode to Gabo! And if you like magical realism, then you should definitely run and get a copy of Where There Was Fire immediately if not sooner. Although be warned: you’ll never look at a banana quite the same way again.