Introduction

Gold Medal Winner, Autobiography/Memoir, 2015 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.
Rita is an infant when her father leaves a successful career in the US to live in “paradise”?a seaside village in the Dominican Republic. The Coconut Latitudes is her haunting, lyrical memoir of surviving a reality far from the envisioned Eden?and of the terrible cost of keeping secrets.

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Excerpt

Introduction

Before I am born, my father, for reasons shrouded in mystery, abruptly leaves a successful engineering career in the United States. He buys two hundred and fifty acres of remote beachfront land on Samana Bay in the Dominican Republic. This small, Spanish-speaking nation occupies two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola and is ruled by the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Haiti occupies the rest of the landmass. Trade winds blow year-round all the way from the deserts in Africa, combing through palm groves and shaping the trunks into inverted commas. The island is also in the main path of hurricanes that storm through the Atlantic and Caribbean from June through November. In 1946, when I am six weeks old and my sister Berta is four, my father moves us into this instability. Our family lands—with a pile of suitcases, a box of books, and bright Fiesta dinnerware—years before there will be electric power or actual roads to Miches, the closest village. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. What do you think motivated the author to share her life story, and what was your response to her voice?
2. Discuss the importance of place in this memoir. How does the author use the contrast between life in the Dominican Republic and life in America as a tool?
3. One of the questions this book asks is about the importance of truth and honesty in family relationships, and about acceptance and forgiveness, especially in the relationship to self. Discuss how that is explored in the memoir.
4. How did your view of each of the characters change as you read the book?
5. Compare this book to other memoirs your group has read. Is it similar to any of them? What do you think your lasting impression of the book will be?

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