This story is both beautiful and haunting.
Spanning over a century across different continents this multigenerational story is breathtaking in its exploration of love, loss, immigration and generational trauma.

With a dual narrative we follow Mara in the present day who is sent on an assignment to the Canary Islands. While there she begins to look in to her family history, believing her Great Grandmother was born there. She discovers that the matriarch so loved by her family was said to have been aboard, The Valbanera, the tragic shipwreck known as “The poor man’s titanic”, that sunk off the coast of Cuba along with her husband and baby. This twist shocks Mara in to the need to discover her own roots and family history, and the secrets that have been passed through the generations. If her Great Grandmother was aboard the ship then how did Mara come in to being? The narrative switches between Mara and Catalina, her Great Grandmother, and piece by piece we begin to unravel the mystery.

We get to know both women, who despite living decades apart share many of the same hopes, fears, and dreams.

This novel spoke to me as a new mother, the depth of a mother’s love is so poignantly described, the way our hearts change shape and the enormous weight the love carries. The pain on the page felt raw and visceral and I felt as though I was living in Catalina’s story. The author speaks so candidly about the fear of emigration, of how it feels to travel on a boat away from the only land you have ever known as home. Using her own firsthand experience in emigrating from Cuba as a teenager, we are swept up in emotion and this added so much depth to the story.

I am so grateful to have had the chance to read this before publication, thank you to NetGalley and Union Square and co for the eARC.
My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I found so much beauty in Deeper Than the Ocean, a generational saga that touches upon the complexities of woman- and motherhood across Spain, Cuba, and the United States. Our protagonists, each from different decades, face oppressive traditions, regimes and trauma, but also find moments of meaning and happiness. Mirta Ojito writes brilliantly as she floats between perspectives and timelines, and the story is engaging as we uncover century-old secrets and mystery of our main characters’s great-grandmother.
Ojito describes the sea, islands and trees with such expressive care and love, and her descriptions of foods and smells (especially cafe con leche) is almost visceral. This novel is a powerful testament to grief and life that keeps persevering. Knowing Ojito’s personal connections to this story made the stakes feel higher, and the pain all that much heartbreaking.
As we also learn that the story about the Valbanera ship was true, Ojito brings the readers into this tragedy with pure empathy. The almost-forgotten events of the Valbanera is a cautionary tale that needs to be highlighted in history and not erased.
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