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The Promise We Keep Quiet: How Silence Shapes a Family, and a Thriller

What stayed with me after reading Lost Innocence: The Pact was not a single twist, it was the quiet. I kept thinking about the way a family can agree to stay silent without ever saying so out loud, and how that silence, kept at first out of love, slowly starts to decide things for them. The story is set in contemporary Havana, where three schoolboys, Pedro Martínez Pérez, Rafael and Juan, face the university entrance examination that will decide their futures, and fear turns them into customers for stolen answers. I found myself less interested in whether they would get caught than in what their choice set in motion, because behind the man who sold them the answers stands the Northstar Continuity Review, a network that has spent twelve years turning help into a system for sorting children, and the boys only begin to see it when it is already around them. What made me keep reading was the price of that silence, paid in small installments rather than all at once. Pedro pays his share wit...
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The Courage to Tell a Family Story Honestly

What stayed with me after I finished reading Lost Innocences: The Pact was not a single twist, it was the quiet question underneath the story, what it costs to tell the truth plainly when softening it would be kinder to everyone in the room. I kept thinking about the families I know who tell their stories in fragments, a name mentioned and then dropped, a place described in detail and then never mentioned again, and how the gaps in those stories can feel heavier than the parts spoken aloud. Reading this book made me listen more carefully to those silences, not to fill them with invention, but to notice what they protect and what they cost. The novel is set in contemporary Havana, at the Colegio San Jerónimo, where Pedro Martínez Pérez and his friends Rafael and Juan face the university entrance examination that will decide their futures. Fear turns them into customers, and they pay Eulogio, an unlicensed spiritual practitioner, five hundred dollars each for the examination answers, wi...
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The Stories We Carry Across the Sea: Exile, Memory, and the Novel That Holds Them

What stayed with me after I finished reading Lost Innocences: The Pact was an image that would not leave me alone, the luggage that never gets unpacked, the stories told late at night at a kitchen table, and the way a family carries a place it left behind in photographs and voices and food. I went into the book expecting a thriller, and it is a thriller, but what kept me thinking long after the last page was quieter than suspense, it was the question of what we do with the stories we inherit, whether we carry them faithfully, whether we pass them on, and what it costs us when we keep them silent. Reading it made me think about my own family stories, the ones told in fragments, a sentence here and a memory there, because some memories were painful to say out loud, and I found myself listening more carefully to the silences in those stories, not just to the words. The novel itself is set in contemporary Havana, and it follows three schoolboys, Pedro Martínez Pérez and his friends Rafael...
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The Playlist Behind Lost Innocence

I did not expect a thriller about an examination to stay with me through its sounds, but that is what happened when I read Lost Innocences: The Pact. Long after I finished it, what I kept hearing was the morning around the Colegio San Jerónimo, a radio behind a doorway, a vendor calling out over traffic, a bolero drifting from a kitchen while a mother packed lunch for a son who was already lying to her. The book never prints a playlist, yet the music is inside the sentences, in the pacing, in the places where a scene breathes and the places where it does not. What stayed with me most was how quiet the frightening parts are. Pedro Martínez Pérez, Rafael and Juan are three students facing an examination that will decide their futures, and fear makes them customers of Eulogio, a spiritual practitioner who sells certainty for five hundred dollars each. The scenes where they are most afraid are the quietest scenes in the book, and I found myself leaning in during those silences, the way you...
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Faith on the Page: Writing Belief Without Preaching

What stayed with me after reading Lost Innocences: The Pact was the way belief enters the story without announcing itself, and how much of the reading experience turned on that quiet entry. I went in expecting a thriller about three boys in contemporary Havana, Pedro Martínez Pérez and his friends Rafael and Juan, facing a university entrance examination that will decide their futures, and I found myself instead thinking about the bargains frightened people make when a decision cannot be postponed. They pay Eulogio, a spiritual practitioner who sells certainty to the desperate, five hundred dollars each for the examination answers, and Pedro pays his share with his mother's stolen jewelry, while Yadira, the housekeeper who served the family for eight years, is accused and dismissed in his place. The book never excuses that crime, and that refusal to excuse it is part of why the faith in the story felt honest to me, because it is tested inside guilt, not kept apart from it. The pas...
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The Business of Being an Author: What Nobody Tells Debut Novelists

What stayed with me after reading Lost Innocences: The Pact was not only the story itself, it was how much of the story is about the terms attached to help. I finished the book thinking about Pedro Martínez Pérez and his friends Rafael and Juan in contemporary Havana, facing a university entrance examination that will decide their futures, and I kept returning to the moment they pay Eulogio, a spiritual practitioner who sells certainty to the desperate, five hundred dollars each for the examination answers. On the page it looks like a simple transaction, a frightened student buying a way out of fear, and then the book slowly shows me what that payment really buys. Behind Eulogio stands the Northstar Continuity Review, a foundation network that classifies children and converts help into obedience, and I found myself reading every later offer of help in the novel with a new suspicion, asking what signature, what name, what silence was expected in return. That suspicion followed me out of...
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How I Write Dialogue That Sounds Real

What stayed with me after reading Lost Innocences: The Pact was the way people in it talk around the thing they are afraid to say. I noticed it early, in contemporary Havana, where three schoolboys sit together and try to speak their way around a fear they do not want to name. The university entrance examination is less than three weeks away and it will decide their futures, so they joke, they change the subject, they speak in circles, and then, in a quieter voice, they say the thing they have been avoiding. That hesitation felt true to me in a way that a clean confession never would, because frightened people rarely announce their fear in tidy sentences. They bargain with it, they ask a friend what he would do as if the question belonged to someone else, they agree too quickly and then add a condition, as if the condition could undo the agreement. Pedro Martínez Pérez is the boy I listened to most closely. When he and his friends Rafael and Juan go to Eulogio, a spiritual practitione...
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