The Weight of the Heart

May 1, 2020

Anna, Julia, and Marion have reunited at their neglected childhood home in Madrid, Spain. The lingering bad memories and creepiness of the place since their father's death have led Julia to hire a santera to clean the energy of the house, despite her sisters' skepticism about the supernatural cleansing with its strange rituals. As the rituals progress, the sisters are forced to face the hurts of their past, the result of their Spanish mother dying young and the girls being left with their cruel English father. He had wanted his wealthy, educated daughters to marry well with men of his choosing, but Marion fell in love with a bullfighter, Julia with a woman, and Anna with her father's business partner. When they wouldn't defer to him, their father set out to remove their lovers in harsh, sometimes fatal ways, causing lasting damage to all of their relationships. VERDICT Herself born in Spain to a Spanish mother and English father, Aikin offers her second English-language novel (after We Shall See the Sky Sparkling). Her visceral writing effectively evokes the Spanish setting, but even with the hopeful ending the melancholy characters and their experiences make for dark reading.--Melissa DeWild, Comstock Park, MI

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2020
Aikin's (We Shall See the Sky Sparkling, 2019) latest is a beautifully written novel that captures the love and loss that haunts sisters Marion, Julia, and Anna Hurt. After their mother's untimely death, their father became incredibly controlling and mean to the young girls. Two years after his death, the adult sisters return to their childhood home, a mansion that is like a tomb of lost hopes and dreams. Free-spirited Julia hires an old acquaintance, Delia, to perform a cleansing ritual called a limpieza to rid the house of its negative energy so the sisters can make a quick sale. Anna, the youngest, frequently indulges her sisters' whims, believing that it is easier to pacify them than to stick up for herself. Marion is resistant to the cleansing, believing it will do more harm than good. As Delia begins, the three sisters immediately find themselves at odds. Anna narrates stories of pain that each sister and her romantic life suffered at the hands of their father. The three women are forced to face their inner demons alongside one another in a novel that is filled with pain but also with healing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)