High Spirits

Housing 11 interconnected short stories centering the Dominican diasporic experience, Camille Gomera-Tavarez’s emotionally sophisticated creation follows a narrative throughline via multiple generations and members of the extended Belén family. Shifting readers to different time periods and locales, including the family’s store in a fictional pre-automobile-era Dominican Republic town and a lockdown in a contemporary New Jersey high school, each story utilizes close third-person tellings and serves as a snapshot of the family’s broader history. It is told in a style both utterly real and distinctly magical – full of intensely lyrical and poetic imagery exploring machismo, mental health, family, and identity.