Saving the World

November 28, 2005
In Alvarez's appealingly earnest fifth novel (after A Cafecito Story
), two women living two centuries apart each face "a crisis of the soul" when their fates are tied to idealistic men whose commitments to medical humanitarian missions end in disillusionment. Alma Heubner's husband, Richard, goes to the Dominican Republic to help eradicate AIDS, while Alma, a bestselling Latina writer, stays at home in Vermont to work on a story about a real, ill-fated 19th-century expedition chaperoned by Doña Isabel Sendales y Gómez, the spinster director of a Spanish orphanage who agrees to vaccinate 20 of her charges with cowpox and bring them from Spain to Central America to prevent future smallpox epidemics. While the leader of the anti-smallpox expedition, Dr. Francisco Balmis, and Richard see their missions collapse in defeat, Doña Isabel and Alma surmount their personal depressions to find inner strength. Alvarez depicts her two heroines with insightful empathy and creates vivid supporting characters. But her effort to find resonating similarities between the intertwined plots sometimes feels contrived, and the details of Doña Isabel's odyssey slow the momentum. The narrative culminates in a compelling scene in which greed and ineptitude trump idealism, dramatizing the question of whether the means are ever justified by the ends.

Starred review from January 15, 2006
A successful Latina novelist, 50-year-old Alma lives in rural Vermont with husband Richard, a manager for development projects in Third World countries. Alma is deeply, passionately in love with Richard, but she is also suffering from writer's block and severe depression; she simply can't get started on the Latino family saga she promised her agent and editor. Instead, she becomes obsessed with another story -that of Don Francisco Balmis, who from 1803 to 1810 traveled throughout the New World with orphan boys as live carriers to inoculate the citizens of New Spain against smallpox, and Doñ a Isabel, who accompanied him to watch over the boys. Both are actual historical figures, but little is known about Doñ a Isabel, and it is she around whom Alma weaves a novel. When Richard travels to her native Dominican Republic and is taken hostage at a green center he'd established there, Alma looks to her creation, Doñ a Isabel, for courage. Alvarez's ("In the Time of the Butterflies") descriptions of nature and character are both naturalistic and poetic, creating a psychological novel-within-a-novel that is intense and riveting. For all libraries." -Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, OR"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2005
In a time of terrorism and the need for concerted humanitarian efforts, both Amy Tan in " Saving Fish from Drowning" (2005) and Julia Alvarez in " Saving the World" consider how the dream of saving others is at once essential and naive. A writer adept at linking momentous past events with current realities, the perennially popular Alvarez portrays two courageous and giving women, one based on a historical figure, the other a present-day writer not unlike Alvarez herself. A successful novelist from the Dominican Republic married to an American and living in Vermont, Alma, although disgusted by the commercialization of literature, is working on a novel about Francisco Xavier Balmis, the messianic early-nineteenth-century Spanish doctor who attempted to halt the spread of smallpox in the New World. Her main focus is Isabel Sendales y Gomez, the only woman on Balmis' medical quest. Scarred by the pox and remarkably resilient, Isabel cares for the nearly two dozen boys who are serving as living carriers of the smallpox vaccine. Alvarez alternates between her imaginative take on Isabel's smallpox mission, and Alma's confrontation of a contemporary plague, AIDS. As Alma's do-gooder husband is pulled into a violent protest in the Dominican Republic against a pharmaceutical company using the poor to test AIDS medications, Alma cares for her Vermont neighbor, Helen, who is dying of cancer while Helen's son, an "ethical terrorist," runs amok. In this cleverly structured and seductive page-turner, Alvarez uses romance and suspense to leaven probing inquiries into plagues, poverty, and politics; altruism and self-aggrandizement; good intentions gone wrong; and the way stories are told.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)