The Wildest Sun

July 1, 2023

When tragedy forces Delphine Auber to leave postwar Paris just as she is coming into adulthood, she seizes the chance to find the father she never knew. The only problem: she's been told that her father is literary lightning bolt Ernest Hemingway. So off she goes to New York's Harlem, Havana, and Key West. From the author of the New York Times best-selling debut Fifty Words for Rain. Prepub Alert.

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October 9, 2023
Lemmie (Fifty Words for Rain) delivers a lackluster tale of an aspiring writer who grew up believing she’s the daughter of Ernest Hemingway and hopes that meeting him will bring fulfillment. Since childhood, Delphine Auber, now 17 in 1945 Paris, has taken care of her alcoholic mother Sylvie, who was once a friend to the Lost Generation writers and claimed Hemingway is Delphine’s father. Following Sylvie’s death, Delphine leaves Paris for New York City and lives in Harlem with Blue and Delia, family friends who show her parental love for the first time. She befriends Teddy, an ill-fated actress whose beauty and hard drinking remind Delphine of her mother. Desperate to fund a trip to Cuba to meet Hemingway, Delphine steals money from Teddy’s boyfriend. After arriving in Havana in December 1946, she hires a Spanish tutor who encourages her to approach Hemingway. She does, while Hemingway is fishing, but she’s afraid to take the conversation beyond small talk (“Papa didn’t claim me on sight,” she narrates dejectedly). The prose is hackneyed, but Lemmie manages to generate empathy for Delphine as she stays on in Cuba, where she reconsiders her assumptions about her paternity after receiving a letter from an old friend of Sylvie’s and tries her own hand at writing. This one’s for Lost Generation obsessives only.

October 15, 2023
A search for her father takes a 16-year-old Parisienne on a voyage of self-discovery across two continents and two decades. When we meet Delphine in September 1945, she tells us she has killed someone but gives no details until much later. We know right away who she thinks her father is: Ernest Hemingway, who Delphine's mother says was her lover for two years before their baby was born in 1929 and he decamped to the U.S. Despite having dealt with her mother's alcoholism and unreliability throughout her childhood, Delphine fiercely believes this to be true. This conviction carries her first to New York, where she takes refuge in Harlem with a nurturing Black couple who knew her mother in Paris, then later to Havana, where she has heard Hemingway is living. Her quest for Papa is the narrative line on which Lemmie hangs a touching coming-of-age tale. Delphine exhibits the classic traumatized personality of an alcoholic's child: simultaneously guilty and angry. She assuages the guilt in New York by befriending and trying to help a drug-addicted party girl; when that blows up, she flees for Havana. There, she settles in to write the novels that will show Papa she is truly his daughter. She does eventually make contact, but the novel's central action over the next 14 years is Delphine's slow maturation, which includes clearer-eyed assessments of her mother, Hemingway, and even his books that she once uncritically admired. Her growth is fostered in large part by Javier, initially hired as her guide and translator but ultimately her friend and savvy mentor. Castro's overthrow of the Batista regime paves the way for the final stage in Delphine's odyssey. She has chronicled her struggles and insecurities so affectingly that readers are likely to be tolerant of closing chapters that too neatly wrap up a plot grounded in messy ambiguities. A strong story with an engaging protagonist.

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