A Place Where the Sea Remembers by Sandra Benitez

A Place Where the Sea Remembers by Sandra Benitez

In, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, several events take place to describe the little city of Santiago, Mexico. This town is just south of the border by El Paso, Texas. The book focuses around a lady known as the Remedios. She is a very old healer that helps people with their problems of love, hate, etc. She is the "good" in the book, whereas El Brujo, the warlock, is the bad man in the book. This book's other strong point is that it has several short narratives that focus on one, or a few citizens of Santiago. A few examples are, Candelario (the salad maker), Marta (16 year old that's pregnant), Fulgencio (the photographer that loses all of his equipment) and Don Justo Flores (left his wife and kids and now it haunts him when one of his daughters die). In these stories, these people go threw hardships and ordeals that teach us, the readers, how to or not to deal with life when it isn't looking UP.

This novel really stirred my emotions, especially in the beginning. For example, Candelario works at a restaurant owned by a man named Don Gustavo. Candelario is the salad maker and what taught, by Don Gustavo himself, how to make a perfect Caesar salad for his customers. The doctor and his wife came in and both ordered salads and Candelario made the salads exactly to Don's instructions, but the customers were not pleased. Since they were not pleased Don fired Gustavo on the spot that night. This made me very angered with Don and people like Don. It sucks when you do something right but then someone is displeased so all of a sudden it was the wro...

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...tched around and it was Marta's baby who would die.

The first page of, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, is actually a flashback back that belongs right before the last group of pages. The second to last chapter states how Richard was swept up the river and taken out to see. In the first page of the novel, Remedios was waiting for a body to be brought to sea. It was Richard's body she was waiting for. The last page had Remedios with all of the family waiting for the body to show up on shore so they can bury him. All poor Chayo can do his sit, wait and cry for the son that she was taking care of.