Silver Springs, MD – The highly ambivalent relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States—on view in the island’s current troubles with the U.S. administration–is explored in The Puerto Rico Trilogy.
Friedman, a veteran journalist-turned-novelist who wrote for the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico and from Washington, D.C., will discuss and sign the novels, which focus on the lives of island residents, exploring with suspense, compassion and dark humor what it has been like to live, love, work and plot there
The Odyssey of Pablo Camino, the first book, was inspired by a real-life incident when a stateside doctor, sent to the island for research, claimed in a letter that he purposely killed eight of his patients because of his disgust with the “natives.” In the novel, Pablo Camino, the doctor’s fictional son, a well-known, but troubled Puerto Rican artist, goes on a search for the truth of his father’s possibly murderous past, and about himself.
The Defining Sea, book two, was also sparked by U.S.-Puerto Rico history. Its plot is derived from the U.S, Navy’s decades-long live-fire and bombing exercises on the inhabited Puerto Rico island of Vieques, which caused death and serious illness. After his girlfriend is killed by police during a protest against the Navy’s maneuvers, Richie Perez, a 20-year-old University of Puerto Rico student, delivers drugs between the island and the states to raise money for a scholarship in her name; he comes of age by learning hard truths about life, love and loss.
Ulysses in San Juan, the concluding novel, relates the growing bond between Wolf, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, who has come to Puerto Rico to try to build his life again, and Carmen, a drug addict. The novel. set in 1980, takes the reader on a trip into the San Juan underworld, as well to other island sites, to meet crooked and upright and deeply human characters. The survival theme is extended to Stevie Diaz, a young Newyorican who has recently returned to the island and is searching, through his writing, to find out where he is truly at.
Website: www.byrobertfriedman.com
Facebook: facebook.com/robertfriedmanauthor
Email the author: friedmanro@gmail.com
Series: Puerto Rico Trilogy (Book 3) Ulysses in San Juan
Paperback: 145 pages
Publisher: Brown Posey Press (April 2, 2019) www.sunburypress.com
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1620060442
ISBN-13: 978-1620060445