Elba Iris Pérez’s debut novel, The Things We Didn’t Know, flows along two rivers: one in Woronoco, which means “the winding river,” and the other in Aguas Buenas, the “pure waters” of innocence in Puerto Rico. The confluence of these two memory streams forms a sacred locus of affective significance. Between them runs a larger, wilder river: the river of life, where the narrator Andrea Rodríguez undergoes purification as she carves her path in the world from The Beehive, a dead-end alley in a working-class American town.
This is not a story about place, though place is everywhere. It is the 1950s, and the car, sleek and unyielding, is both talisman and tether for Andrea’s father, Luis. For her mother, Raquel, the car is something else altogether—a means to escape, a symbol of freedom that always remains just out of reach. The opening scene crystallizes this: Raquel, frantic and furious, steals Luis’s car and drives it to the edge of a cliff. This is not a metaphor, though it might as well be.
Precarity defines their lives, literal and otherwise. Raquel disappears for long stretches, leaving Andrea and her brother Pablo to navigate the ruins of their family. Luis stays, but his presence is heavy with absence, his fixation on his car a thin veneer over a deeper unraveling. The house itself reflects this—a liminal space of worn linoleum and nicotine-stained walls, alive in its decay, suffocating in its stillness.
Andrea carries her childhood like luggage she cannot unpack. Every room she inhabits—literal or figurative—holds the weight of what has been said and left unsaid. Pérez excels at rendering these spaces with forensic precision: a screwdriver abandoned on the floor, a pink bicycle consigned to the garage, a jar of peanut butter nearly empty. These objects do not simply exist; they reverberate. The bicycle, for instance, is more than a symbol of freedom denied—it is the promise of motion suspended, the pedal frozen mid-turn.
Family here is not sanctuary but battleground. Luis, clinging to his car as if it might anchor him, is less a father than a man at odds with his own inadequacy. Raquel is both villain and heroine, her rebellion against the confines of domesticity equal parts selfishness and necessity. The children—Andrea and Pablo—are not merely witnesses to this dysfunction; they are its casualties, bearing the psychic debris of their parents’ unresolved conflicts.
And yet, as Pérez reminds us, there is no story of migration without return. At some point, the narrative shifts to Puerto Rico, and the island’s landscape asserts itself with the same visceral force as Woronoco’s factories and train tracks. Here, Pérez’s prose blooms—lush, sensory, evocative. You can feel the humidity settle on your skin, hear the bamboo creak in the wind, smell the earth after a rainstorm. But even in this apparent abundance, there is tension. For Raquel, the island offers a fleeting sense of liberation, but for Andrea and Pablo, it is another dislocation, another fracture.
Among the novel’s most arresting figures is Machi, born Cecilia but uncontainable within such a name. Machi exists as a challenge to the societal and familial norms that hem in every other character. She cuts her hair short, wears men’s clothing, and refuses to apologize for any of it. In a lesser narrative, Machi might have been reduced to stereotype—a tomboy, a “marimacha.” But Pérez gives her nuance, complexity, and, above all, agency. Machi’s resistance is not performative; it is elemental, a refusal to contort herself into a world that demands she be legible to others.
Machi, for all her defiance, embodies a deeper truth about the novel itself. She is not here to resolve the contradictions of her existence but to inhabit them fully. In the same way, Pérez offers no easy resolutions for her characters. Andrea’s journey, shaped by the uprootedness of migration and the weight of memory, is not one of closure but of continuance. Her childhood, such as it is, exists in that liminal space Gramsci described—an interregnum where the old has not yet died, and the new struggles to be born.
The Things We Didn’t Know is not a book that tells you what to think. It leaves you with the jagged edges of its questions, a quiet refusal to smooth them into coherence. That, perhaps, is its greatest strength. And its deepest truth.
Comments