Title Details

The Story of Maria Rabassa follows a mysterious and enchanting young woman who leaves her powerful family in Cartagena de Indias (Columbia) to visit her tía Inez in Miami, but on a whim, follows a giant storm up the East Coast instead. Through sheer happenstance—perhaps—she lands in at Stonecrest Prep, a boarding school in the middle of Maine, to teach English and coach girls’ basketball. There the whim becomes a quest to define exactly who and what she is, to test the strength of her own passions, and to discover if she can share abiding love with a man —somewhat —unlike herself. Because Maria is no ordinary woman. She is a woman with wings. Big, brown, luxurious wings. Her wings are a mutation in her ancient family that surfaces once or twice in each generation and that brings with it certain psychic “energies,” as her father calls them. And whenever she leaves her family’s compound, she binds her gifts with linen strips and hides them under her clothes; she walks through the world with a hump on her back.
It’s not only her hump, however, that makes Maria different. If it were, the handsome and gentle Tucker Rockwell, head of the English Department, would probably have been content with a collegial relationship. Instead she draws him in with her befuddling way with words and coaching and thinking; innocently, she charms him with her warmth, her love of fun and food and nature. She seems to work a kind of magic that dispels animosity and soothes common misery. But Tucker doesn’t know that until after he falls in love with her. And her basketball team, the Crestlets, who have their first-ever winning streak, don’t know it either, except for Cissie and Neely, two of her students and athletes who fight each other to save or destroy her. With Maria, the stakes are always high—for her students, her family, for Tucker, and for herself. Sadly, she cannot extend her magic to prevent her own injury and heartbreak. And when she is forced to flee Stonecrest Prep, it falls to Tucker to mend her heart; to find her in Cartagena and prove himself worthy to a Tribunal of men in Maria’s family who carry the “family resemblance” and who seek to protect her and themselves as well. They make it clear: once he enters their world, he must stay. It is a proposition both complex and simple. The truth is that with Maria Rabassa there is always an exception, a different perspective; she invites the reader to consider the point of view of the fly in the ointment, to accept the mundane and marvelous as simultaneously commonplace and astonishing.
The Story of Maria Rabassa is a novel about falling in love that embraces—no, exists—because of difference. It is a coming-of-age novel that proves that change is not limited by age or by age-old beliefs. The Story of Maria Rabassa invites us to believe in the magic of a happy ending, and like the characters whose lives she touches, readers will be enriched by having Maria Rabassa alight in their lives.