Official Review: What About Your Saucepans?

[mstrick96]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "What about your saucepans?" by Lindsay de Feliz.]

---

Share This Review

---

This book is outstanding on two levels.

First of all, it is a very compelling story. A marketing executive decides to get out of the rat race, quits her job and leaves her husband to move to the Dominican Republic to become a diving instructor. At first, she is enraptured with the beauty and the new culture and is steadily drawn into the culture and a prosperous life and marries a Dominican who eventually decides to make a run for political office. At the end, due to the incredible corruption of the DR political system, they end up losing everything, and at the end of the book are living in a Dominican barrio while fighting for what is rightfully theirs. This is a Shakespearian tragedy that happens to be true.

The second level is the marvelous insights that the story gives us on the Latin American culture and how it differs from what we are used to in the United States and Europe, including the political corruption that is rampant in many Latin American Countries. The attitudes and actions of the popular culture are difficult for European and North American people to understand and the story gives a rich insight into what these attitudes and beliefs are like. IT is also possible to see how the culture with the addition of the power of political connections leads to the corruption and violence of the political systems in such countries.

I have traveled extensively in all of Latin America for over ten years, including the Dominican Republic, before finally retiring. I can verify that this book with the cultural and political insights that it gives into life in many of these countries is very accurate. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and fully understood every aspect of the way it depicted life and politics in the D.R. In other words, the book rings true.

This book is written as a first person narrative account of the life of Lindsay de Feliz. It is by no means a novel. When I first began reading the book, I evaluated it from the standpoint of a review of a typical novel. I was frustrated because I felt that it violated the rule of thumb of writing of “show don’t tell”. However, the insights into the life and the culture of the D.R, intrigued me so I continued reading. Lindsay is “telling” her story in a masterful way. The more I read, the more caught up I became in the life of Lindsay and her husband Danilo. At the end, I wanted to hear “the rest of the story”. But, of course, the rest of the story hasn’t happened yet. My advice to the reader is to just relax and enjoy the story as it unfolds.

As I began the book, I was unsure of where it was headed. By end I decided that this is one of the more satisfying books I have read in a very long time. I would love to have Lindsay and Danilo as friends. I rate this book 4 out of 4 stars.

***
Buy "What about your saucepans?" on Amazon
Buy "What about your saucepans?" on Barnes and Noble

[lindsdefeliz]

Thank you so much for this review. It is especially rewarding coming from someone who knows the region so well. Danilo and I would also be honoured to have you as a friend.

Lindsay de Feliz