The World in Half

Cristina Henríquez

Our heroine Miraflores has never met (nor wanted to meet) her father — and she’s never visited her homeland of Panama. But her situation is about to change, and everything she thought she knew will change along with it.

Miraflores is a college student in Chicago studying earth sciences. Her whole life, it’s been just her and her mom: Mira is the result of a love affair her mother had back in the day in Panama — when she was married to another man. When Mira’s mom learned she was pregnant, she broke off the affair and returned to the US. Mira was born, and her biological father was never in the picture. According to family lore, her dad had no interest in being part of their lives.

But, with Mira’s mother battling a debilitating disease, Mira discovers a cache of letters from her birth father that tells a dramatically different story. So she embarks on a secret trip to Panama to find her father — and to answer the questions that have plagued her young life. Perhaps this mission will help put her family back together again.

In Panama City, it’s not long before she strikes up a friendship with a charming, mischievous young man named Danilo who quickly joins her investigation. As the two follow nebulous leads, he shows her the beauty and history of Panama. When they finally learn the truth about her dad, it raises more questions and feelings than Mira could have imagined.

Mira is a pleasing companion: intelligent, thoughtful, and sometimes hot-headed. The story unfolds via her first-person narration, and it’s a treat to be inside her head.

It’s also a gift to see Panama through her eyes. She has the noticing skills of a first-time visitor, and her investigation takes her to places she’d only visited in her travel guides: the old town, the Miraflores Visitor’s Center on the Canal, a ferry to the dreamy beaches of Toboga Island, and Mi Pueblito (Panama City’s answer to Colonial Williamsburg).

This book could easily have fallen into a Hallmark movie trap: Mira and Danilo have a sweet romance, she finds her father, and everyone lives happily ever after. But this is so much better than that.

The relationships and emotional waves are more complex and deliver a very satisfying exploration of family and friendship — with a side of Panamanian travelogue.

There are at least fifteen hundred active volcanoes in the world. There are dozens of variations: shield volcanoes, composite volcanoes, ice volcanoes, mud volcanoes, submarine volcanoes, subglacial volcanoes, supervolcanoes, and on and on. Some geologists dedicate their entire lives to studying them—how they form, how they behave, the chemical makeup of what they spew, what they signify about the shape of the earth as it was before and the shape of the earth to come. But for the average citizen, the most interesting thing about a volcano is in the story of its eruption. People are fascinated by the idea of a fiery swell building underneath the surface of the earth for millions of years only to one day tear through the crust, flaring it open like a bullet shot through the skin of a peach. They imagine the restless lava disgorged into the air like a heavy and tired geyser, globs of superheated rock and ash rising upward and upward as if all the fury and energy amassed within the earth can’t be stopped… there is something about the process of a volcanic eruption that always strikes me as both beautiful and sad. It’s the pain of the earth bubbling up through the surface and ripping it apart. It’s the earth’s ineluctable heartbreak. — Cristina Henríquez

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