Never Look Back
​Lilliam Rivera

​Acclaimed young adult author Lilliam Rivera has written a riveting novel titled Never Look Back, a contemporary Afro-Latinx retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice Greek myth. It is summer in the Bronx. Dominican Pheus, the neighborhood troubadour is a bachata-singing ladies’ man who is ready to woo the Afro-Latinx young women. He has his sights set on his bachata music but all of that changes when a new young Puerto Rican woman enters the Boogie Down neighborhood.
 
Eury, a Puertoriquena, has come up from Tampa Bay, Florida to stay with her cousin Penelope and her Aunt Titi. She has endured trauma from Hurricane Maria and is now experiencing a serious bout of PTSD. Eury’s mental illness is so severe that she believes that an evil spirit, Ato (meaning bound) is stalking her. Ato is indeed trailing her, but he represents depression and suicidal thoughts so entrenched that her only escape appears to be attendance at a daily Catholic Mass. Eury suffers a near-death fall at the local night club the evening that Pheus performs his music. And like the Greek myth, Orpheus, with the aid of the local Dominican spiritists, journeys to the Underworld to help Eury escape Ato’s stranglehold.
 
Like her other two YA novels, Dealing in Dreams and The Education of Margot Sanchez, the author reels the reader in from the beginning with her punchy prose and realistic dialogue. The updated Greek myth becomes exponentially powerful when set amid the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, disaster gentrification in Puerto Rico, and incorporating themes of gender, mental illness, and Dominican culture.

Lilliam Rivera is the author of four novels including YA titles Dealing in Dreams and The Education of Margot Sanchez and the middle grade Goldie Vance: The Hotel Whodunit. She received the Pushcart Prize in 2016.

Never Look Back is a publication by Bloomsbury USA and can be purchased online at The Bronx is Reading. 
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Reviewed by
Marian Perales
​​9/30/2020

Marian Perales, an editor and historian, received her M.A. in Chicanx history from the Claremont Graduate University. She is an avid reader and book reviewer of BIPOC histories and literature. 
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