The first novel by Cuban-born Ivonne Lamazares is as deeply but jaggedly faceted as the homeland it describes. There is texture, surprising and varied enough to lose oneself happily in detail. There is unrelenting brightness, simultaneously cheerful and searing to the eye -- or to the soul. Human motives are so tangled that no one character can navigate them all. Some isolate a thread and pursue it with single-minded dedication. Others find themselves quite literally at sea without a compass.

The Sugar Island begins and ends with the fatefully paired themes of flight and abandonment. Throughout the book, parents leave children, children leave parents, lovers just leave. Plain folks abandon citizenship for ideology and friendship for upward mobility. These constant departures are set against the ultimate possibility of flight from the island itself.

Tanya, the book's adolescent narrator, is taxed with making philosophical and emotional sense of her mother's frequent absences. When Tanya was 5, "Mama ran off to the mountains to become a rebel guerrillera. No one knew exactly where she had gone until she came back pregnant a year later on a burro."

That was in 1958. By 1966, Tanya's mother, Mirella, is thoroughly disillusioned with the new Cuba and eager to flee to the States with her daughter and young son, Emanuel. "My stomach shut like a fist," Tanya recalls. "Mama was running again, and this time she'd drag us with her in a flimsy boat across the black water."

Instead, Mirella is imprisoned, and Tanya and Emanuel are sent from their rural town to live in Havana with Petra, a great-aunt of Tanya's perennially absent father and an unreconstructed elitist. Petra is an aged piano teacher who clings to her lace doilies and her personal maid against all odds -- at least for a while. Her response to the revolution is to ignore what she can and exploit what she must. Her single-minded goal becomes making the system work for Emanuel, who is gifted in music. Lamazares' vivid descriptions of Petra, her home and her Old Havana neighborhood are reason enough to read The Sugar Island.

The focus on Santeria iconography and practices is equally powerful. Petra's neighbor is a Santeria priest, and his step-daughter Paula becomes Tanya's closest confidante. Lamazares treats the religion's blend of Christian and West African beliefs with sensitivity, particularly in her depiction of how women turn to the saints in an uncertain world. The priest is a brutish character, however, and Paula's mother is despicably weak in her inability to protect her child.

The interplay of Santeria, Catholicism and socialist fervor is a rich theme for Lamazares throughout the book. Her opening image of Mirella riding home from the revolution on a burro is highly ironic; Mirella tries repeatedly but without success to martyr herself for a noble cause. The trouble is, her causes are little more than cliches: sacrificing oneself for the revolution, risking one's life for the children's future. As Tanya comes to realize: "What you left behind -- people, things -- never caught up with you again. There was power in this, a kind of thrill. It must have been what Mama felt each time she ran off."

Ultimately, Mirella makes her escape, "a mother's gift" for the reluctant, love-hungry daughter who would follow her anywhere to get approval. Their rescue at sea is dramatic, but when the television crews go away, they are just two more unskilled refugees. If post-revolutionary Cuba was replete with psychological and physical humiliation, life in Hialeah, Fla., is shameful in different ways: food stamps and dead-end jobs; anti-Castro philanthropists who are eager to exploit Mirella and Tanya for their story but blind to their needs as people.

A dispirited Mirella describes the relative who found them their low-rent apartment: "Fourteen years in this country and she walks the floor of a purse factory. She's a floorlady. She bullies poor people like herself." The job reminds Tanya of the men who beat enslaved workers in the 19th-century sugar mills of Matanzas.

The reader is not surprised when Mirella's solution mocks the immigrant's tale of hard work for the sake of the children. The mothers in this book are not sympathetic characters, and the fathers are no better. Lamazares' unrelenting presentation of family life is the novel's weakest aspect. Even at home, Mirella is often "absent," self-absorbed or locked in her room on a chain-smoking hunger strike.

As a narrator, Tanya relates her adolescent rites of passage in some detail, but larger cultural transitions and transformations are more central to the novel's message. This narrator has been compared to Holden Caulfield, but The Sugar Island offers few parallels to the complex social and psychological observations found in The Catcher in the Rye.

Lamazares herself emigrated to the United States at age 14, and while her novel offers commentary on two nations, neither perspective is quite complete. Her window on Cuba in the 1960s provides a vivid view, however, and The Sugar Island is well worth a look.

Maria Vesperi, a trustee of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and a former Times editorial writer, has a doctorate in anthropology and teaches at New College in Sarasota.

THE SUGAR ISLAND

By Ivonne Lamazares

Houghton Mifflin, $23

Festival author

Ivonne Lamazares, author of The Sugar Island, will be among the featured authors at the Times Festival of Reading Nov. 11-12 on the Eckerd College campus. Lamazares, who came to the United States from Cuba at age 14, teaches at Miami-Dade Community College in Miami.

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