This year, Marina’s annual summer visit home to the island of Pag in Croatia turns into an extended stay. Marina has a lot to figure out, and home seems like the place to do it, if indeed Pag is still home.
Kristin Vuković’s debut novel is a mouthwatering platter of culture, history, and the everlasting struggle for balance between tradition and progress. “The Cheesemaker’s Daughter” is told from Marina’s perspective on Pag, where she spent most of her childhood and teen years, as Croatia counts down the days before officially joining the European Union in 2013.
After moving to New York as a refugee from the Yugoslav wars, Marina built a life in the bustling city. But her job is unfulfilling and her coworkers unfriendly; her husband is inattentive and unfaithful; and with her trouble having children, it seems like that life she built is wearing down to nothing before her eyes.
There are plenty of distractions for Marina back on Pag, including a struggling family cheese business with failing Soviet-era machines and a rival cheesemaker whose son, Marina’s first love, could be her family’s reputational ruin if he keeps bumping into her and sending sparks flying between them.
Meanwhile, there’s an ongoing push and pull between the characters over gender issues — when to jostle for parity and when to respect tradition and leave it be.
OK, so it may seem like everything is going wrong. And it honestly is. But at least there’s mouthwatering food.
Reading “The Cheesemaker’s Daughter” gave me a thorough craving for cheese and a deep desire to visit Croatia. Vuković employs beautiful, all-encompassing sensory descriptions, from the smell of the herbs in the air to the squawk of seagulls, or the faded floral print on the sheets Marina had since before she could remember. These rich details build an enticing world — a scraggly yet comfortable one, cold but cozy.
Dedicated to the author’s Croatian grandparents who made America home, the novel is culturally rich. Vuković takes us on a tour of Croatian history and cheesemaking that requires no prior knowledge of either, peppering these bits throughout the book like herbs dotting the scraggly seaside landscape. She takes care to explain everything in due time, slowly introducing and building upon the religion, traditions, food and music Marina experiences.
“The Cheesemaker’s Daughter” is a quiet but commanding debut — a bit repetitive, but in a way that forces you to slow down to the speed of life on the island. It’s not the kind of book that leaves you on the edge of your seat needing to know what happens next, but it did leave me yearning to be back in that world after I finished the book and left it.
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