“Tell It to Me Singing” is North Carolina author Tita Ramírez’s riveting debut novel about a family whose foundation is rocked when their matriarch reveals an explosive secret moments before she is rushed into surgery. The daughter searches for the truth in present-day Florida and is blindsided by her conservative mother’s salacious past as a Cuban counterrevolutionary. As the story unfurls, “Tell It to Me Singing” develops into a deeply heartfelt, frequently humorous and historically germane exploration of how one family uses the combination of truth and love to heal from generational pain.
Twenty-eight-year-old Mónica Campo believes the biggest challenge she’s facing is an unmarried pregnancy. She thinks she loves her fiancé Robert, even if she can’t stop thinking about her ex-boyfriend. And Mónica is the first to admit she’s rapidly building resentment toward her older brother Pablo because he doesn’t show up for their codependent parents the way she does.
She spends her evenings after work catching up with her mother Mirta over episodes of their favorite telenovela, “Abismo de pasión.” Family time helps balance her days spent nagging Robert to get rid of the 20 iguanas housed in their second bedroom, which are preventing her from transforming it into a nursery.
Mónica is content with her life, if more than a little ambivalent, until Mirta is diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm and rushed into emergency surgery. While Mirta is being whisked away under sedation, she declares her daughter must know the truth and whispers, “Mónica, your father is Juan.”
Mirta’s words launch the Campo family on a voyage through history that begins on a post-revolutionary farm in Cuba and ends with a weapons dealer in Costa Rica. But first, Mónica has to parse the meaning from her mother’s words as Mirta heals from surgery in a medically induced coma.
Mónica leans on her father, Rolando, fearing for her mother’s outcome and unsure where to source the truth. She convinces herself Mirta must have conflated reality with the absurd love triangle unfolding on “Abismo de pasión.” No other explanation fits. Her parents have been happily married since before Pablo was born, and Rolando is a loving husband and dad.
Love is something that flows freely among the Campo family, and it carries them through the toughest times. They convey their feelings through subtle acts of affection that reveal so much about the depth of their bonds. Every morning while Mirta is comatose, Rolando brings her a café con leche and dabs “a little on her lips around the ventilator” to keep her connected to the things she loves. Mónica follows her father’s example as she sits by Mirta’s bedside, rubbing lemon-pomegranate lotion into her mom’s hands while keeping Mirta up to date on her life.
As the days pass and Mirta slowly heals, confusion replaces Mónica’s fear as the love triangle playing out on “Abismo de pasión” seems to replicate in both women’s lives. The author brilliantly returns to the telenovela throughout the narrative, using the melodrama’s outlandish storylines to add humor and context to her plot.
Mónica complicates her life when she texts her military-medic ex-boyfriend Manny about Mirta’s condition. Manny isn’t happy when he drops by the hospital and discovers Mónica is engaged and expecting a child. Seeing Manny causes Mónica to question her future with Robert.
But nothing prepares Mónica for the knowledge that Mirta’s pre-surgery confession may be true. Upon waking from her coma, Mirta experiences episodes where she seems to exist in a different time and place — with a man named Juan. Mónica is even more befuddled to discover her father is no stranger to Juan’s existence. Yet neither parent will admit the truth.
In a series of missives to her daughter interspersed throughout Mónica’s first-person narrative, Mirta tells of her life in the U.S. as a refugee. Her story beautifully unfolds against Mónica’s storyline as both women seek independence. And, once again, the grandiose characters in “Abismo de pasión” provide humor as they pursue the most obvious form of freedom — escape from imprisonment in a dungeon.
Mirta’s quest for independence takes place during the Mariel boatlift, an historical event when 125,000 Cubans migrated to the U.S. in 1980. Ramírez paints a complex picture of the hardship Mirta endured in Cuba that spurred her counterrevolutionary activities against Fidel Castro and subsequent immigration to America.
Mónica achieves freedom through her search for identity. Furious with her parents for keeping her paternity secret, she refuses to look after them any longer. She’s done being the dutiful daughter who does the right thing, and she moves out of Robert’s house and into a hotel, hoping to figure herself out before her baby is born.
As Mónica’s anger festers, Mirta descends deeper into her own confusion that sends her on a search for Juan that puts everyone, including Mónica’s baby, in jeopardy.
Tita Ramírez doesn’t only provide cultural context by featuring a telenovela as the cornerstone of her debut novel, she uses the classic dramatic structure to craft “Tell It to Me Singing” into a propulsive, heart-pumping and unexpected melodrama that is achingly human and bursting with love.
FICTION
“Tell It to Me Singing”
by Tita Ramírez
S&S / Marysue Rucci Books, 400 pages, $28.99
About the Author
