The Wild Scent of Mastranto Flowers

By: Franklin A. Díaz Lárez

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Synopsis: The Aroma of Mastranto takes place in 2012, and is the story of twelve-year-old Ana’s trip back to Venezuela, where she was born. She had moved to Spain with her parents when she was a baby, and now is revisiting her native country for the first time. As Ana travels through Venezuela with her father, we read the letters she writes to a school friend telling her impressions of a divided, politicized society split by inequality and ravaged by insecurity and food scarcity, and her dismay at the idolatry of Simón Bolivar, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez that she observes. Ana’s trip is, most of all, a journey back into her own family history. When they visit the site where decades earlier a brutal massacre of Venezuelan guerrilla fighters took place, her father tells her how those same events scarred his family with violence and dysfunction that lasted for a generation, leaving none of them untouched. This book contains scenes of extreme violence and cruelty, including disturbing sexual violence, and may not be suitable for all readers.