AFTERLIFE by Julia Alvarez

Antonia is still mourning the death of her beloved husband, Sam, after almost a year and finds herself at loose ends, until suddenly she has too much on her plate.  Her oldest sister, Izzy, has vanished en route to Antonia’s 66^th birthday party, and the girlfriend of her neighbor’s undocumented employee, Mario, needs a place to stay.  Unbeknownst to Antonia and Mario until her arrival, Estela, the undocumented teenaged girlfriend, is pregnant with another man’s child, and now Mario wants nothing to do with her.  Antonia finds herself torn between two crises while trying to stay true to her mantra of taking care of herself first.  Her reluctance to help Estela brings with it a heavy dose of guilt, since she knows that Sam would have helped Estela in every way possible.  Plus, Antonia is a Dominican immigrant herself.  As for the Izzy crisis, Antonia has three sisters working on that situation, all convinced that Izzy is mentally unstable, and Antonia questions whether her participation is even necessary.  She boomerangs between the Izzy problem and the Estela problem, both geographically and emotionally, and this tug-of-war between the two emergencies is the driving force in the novel.  The author vividly and eloquently paints Antonia as a truly relatable character who deftly juggles both crises while battling uncertainty about how much commitment she wants to make to either one.  Her sisters are tugging on her to help resolve the Izzy situation, and Sam, or at least the memory of Sam, is tugging on her to help Estela.  I have to admit that I felt that Estela was more in need of assistance than the sisters, but family pressures are difficult to deny, particularly when one family member has become a threat to herself.