After the Ocean goes down a path not often taken these days: a feel-good novel. And because Lauren Rico effectively sustains curiosity about a man who goes missing in the prologue with a moving story of his distraught but determined wife, then and thirty years later, and infuses the tale with a love of classical music and Puerto Rican culture, Rico ensures that sentiment triumphs over sentimentality. She also incorporates a hard-eyed look at a justice system amenable to manipulation and a medical system not yet able to counter the effects of severe injury.
At the center of the tale is Emilia Oliveras, a superbly talented pianist from Puerto Rico, who made it into a prestigious music institute in New York, where she met the love of her life, Paul Winstead, an equally skilled musician who’s a cellist. Paul comes from a wealthy and powerful oil-rich Texas family that opposes his relationship with a lower-income woman, from a Spanish-speaking country, especially one whose mother is in jail for murder. After three years living – and playing – together, however, Paul and Emilia elope and take a cruise to Puerto Rico. And suddenly, on the second day of their honeymoon on board a luxurious ocean liner, Paul disappears: that’s the startling prologue, which describes his last moment of consciousness – Emilia’s face.
The novel then moves to Emilia, who gets nowhere with the ship’s authorities, and in desperation calls Paul’s parents. It takes no time for Paul’s father and brother to take action, including promoting the idea that Emilia killed Paul because she was a gold-digger. She must flee for her life, and with the kind assistance of a local investigator, does just that, only recently aware that she is pregnant with Paul’s child, who will be Gracie. Emilia winds up 4,000 miles away in Oregon, where she changes her name to Emily Oliver and in time, meets and marries a good man with whom she has a daughter, Meg.
It turns out that both girls, eight years apart, are gifted pianists, just like their mother, though no one really knows about Emilia’s past. Gracie, however, suffers an accident to her hand and gives up music, fearing she won’t be perfect. But she transfers the passion and expertise she once gave to Bach and Beethoven to the study of law. Meg meanwhile takes over musically, in a big way, as Gracie somewhat begrudgingly admits when she hears Meg play at a piano competition: her younger sister is brilliant. Rico’s descriptions, especially of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and later of a Bach sonata, are indicative of her own accomplishments, which also include writing poetry.
There are good guys and bad guys in After the Ocean, but as the narrative unfolds over different times in the past, in the present-tense grays moderate sme of the bad guys while the women who emerge only in the present-tense chapters learn how flawed their takes have been on the past especially about their maternal grandmother who went to prison.
Their new perspectives strengthen them. No spoiler alert, so nothing on resolution, but after you finish reading Lauren Rico’s engaging new novel After the Ocean, you may say, “hey, they don’t make `em like this anymore”. And you’d be right. After the Ocean’s got mystery, romance, suspense, redemption, an exotic setting, and a multi-generational domestic drama likely to appeal to a broad audience.
