In her thought-provoking debut, The Volcano Daughters, author Gina María Balibrera deftly melds Latin American myth with El Salvadoran history, fashioning an imaginative tale told with attitude, a fresh view of real-life events, and a pacing that enlivens every page. It’s also magical realism at its best. The story is narrated by the ghosts of four young Indigenous women — Lourdes, Maria, Cora, and Lucia — murdered during an uprising brutally suppressed by the government.

Spanning 1914 to 1942, the novel begins in Izalco, a village on a volcano in western El Salvador. The future ghosts are still alive, sisters Graciela and Consuelo (the book’s protagonists) are small, and everyone is growing up together. Their mothers all work on a coffee plantation and protect their daughters “with joyful ferocity.” A shadowy assortment of largely absent fathers has no impact on their lives, except for Graciela and Consuelo’s father, Germán, whose boyhood best friend — a general referred to pejoratively as El Gran Pendejo — now rules the land. He summons Germán to the capital to be his spiritual advisor, and as circumstances unfold, first Consuelo and then Graciela end up there, too, thrust into the general’s clutches.

The year 1932 brings a genocidal massacre to the beloved Izalco. Amid the violence, Graciela and Consuelo, now grown, flee the country, each assuming the other to be dead but hoping not. The now-deceased Lourdes, Maria, Cora, and Lucia follow both girls around the globe, assisting, prodding, and bearing witness to their struggles. The spectral quartet acknowledges the complexity of the storytelling process:

“Every myth, every story, has at least two versions. The growing of indigo and coffee…the story of a disgraced mother, a dictator, a nation’s beauties...These mythic figures shift shapes, depending on who tells their story and who listens.”

Along separate paths, the girls make their way to Hollywood, Paris, and finally San Francisco’s Cannery Row, facing myriad challenges along the way that require all their gumption and wits to overcome. As the ghosts wryly observe, “Survival was a shape-shifter.”

Renowned authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende helped popularize the magical-realism genre, and Balibrera serves it well here, highlighting the political unrest that many Central and South American countries endured in the 20th century. She also shines an unflinching light on the reign of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the longest-serving president in El Salvador’s history.

Born not far from the volcano region himself, General Martínez crushed the 1932 Indigenous revolution in a crackdown that led to the deaths of as many as 40,000 peasants. He openly admired Hitler and Mussolini, believed in the occult, and established laws that discriminated against Indian, Arab, and Chinese minorities and forbade Black people from entering the country. The fictional El Gran Pendejo is his kindred spirit.

Balibrera’s writing is rich and lyrical, but anyone not fluent in Spanish would do well to keep a Spanish-English dictionary on hand for the many unfamiliar words and phrases peppering the text. Still, such language adds flavor and nuance to the prose, which is immersive, highly visual, sometimes humorous, and often provocative. The women portrayed in these pages are strong and resourceful, conflicted and authentic. And the political climate, not unlike ours, is awash in corruption, inequity, and indifference to the needs of the downtrodden. Thus, The Volcano Daughters, while telling a good story, surreptitiously forces us to look more critically at our own democracy.

Formerly employed by the Library of Congress and the defense industry, Anne Eliot Feldman is currently at work on a writing project of her own.

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