The Coconut Latitudes

By Rita M. Gardner,

Book cover of The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean

Book description

Gold Medal Winner, Autobiography/Memoir, 2015 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Rita is an infant when her father leaves a successful career in the US to live in "paradise"-a seaside village in the Dominican Republic. The Coconut Latitudes is her haunting, lyrical memoir of surviving a reality far from the envisioned Eden-and…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Coconut Latitudes as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

After a blogger in Thailand interviewed me, he told me I should meet the author Rita Gardner, “Her memoir is about growing up in a Latin culture like yourself.” Rita and I exchanged books and personal stories, but her upbringing was darker than mine.

The young family moves to a remote village on a beach in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s. The two daughters are not only isolated, but their alcoholic father rants and makes irrational demands while the mother does nothing to protect them. During the light of day the dad proclaims them a “happy family, living…

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