In “Muerto Montesculo” by Luisa Vox, the title character is a young, attractive, and intelligent Latina woman who is a committed socialite who loves to travel. In her role as an agent for a New York-based firm doing Cuban business, she falls out of love with her husband, a much younger man, and decides to marry him despite his obvious lack of ability for marriage. A chance meeting with a former lover changes her mind though, and she chooses to remain with her much less than perfect husband.
The novel’s plot, unfortunately, is one of a kind, and not something that can easily be told from a distance. It is more of a coming-of-age story about the changing relationship between two women. They meet and fall in love, are married, and then experience the agony of their careers moving farther apart while staying together for the sake of their children. It would have been easy to gloss over the transformation in their relationship or to just write it as a romance story: the plot becomes repetitive because it is so familiar, but because it is also so sad, we keep reading because it is a love story. It is at its best when it depicts the sacrifices that these two women make in order to maintain their relationship and their family. This is why “Muerto Montesculo” works so well as both a fiction and a non-fiction novel.
The novel has many lessons to learn for women who may still be mired in their own adolescence, or who may still think that marriage and children are the only obstacles standing between them and happiness. The novel is very descriptive, but it is also very relatable. While Vox is older than the average woman in her mid-thirties, she is not old enough to be realistic about losing perspective, and her concerns about age and commitment are very similar to the ones women deal with throughout their lives. It is a very good read and one that will help you understand the challenges that young and older women face.