Book Review: A Greek Love

I was sent a copy of A Greek Love by Zoe Valdes a while ago, but I just read it over the past few days.

This novel is very short and translated from Spanish. The novel goes back and forth in time a bit and follows main character Zé, a woman living in Cuba. When Zé was a teenager, she has a short lived affair with a Greek sailor and she winds up pregnant. At the time it is a huge scandal for her to be unwed and pregnant in Havana so she leaves to live with her aunt, hours away. Fast forward decades later and her son is a famous musician with an invitation to perform in Greece. Zé gets permission to leave Cuba and travel with her son for the concerts and goes looking for the man who she has thought passionately of for years, the father of her son. But will the real-life man live up to the image she has of him in her head?

The novel was a really quick read and I think there’s something really relatable about building up a memory of a person or relationship in your mind to be better than it or they really were. I liked the novel and like I said found some aspects of it to be relatable, but I didn’t get very invested in the story. It could be because the novel is short or maybe there was something lost in translation, but overall I liked it.