Review of Everyone Leaves by Wendy Guerra

*Everyone Leaves* by Wendy Guerra, translated by Achy Obejas (2025). Published by HarperVia.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

I’ve always and forever been a library girl from the bottom of my heart. When I was a child my mother would always take us to the library and I’d pick out a ridiculous amount of books, and I’ve continued that tradition when I moved home from New York City, after college, in order to keep picking my brain for new stories out there in the world.

During this time while unemployed, in-between applying to jobs, I’ve been spending a lot of time just catching up on my advance copy collection. I’ve been running this blog for about four years now, and I get direct emails from publishers along with advance copies through NetGalley. I typically prefer NetGalley though because I only have so much room in my bedroom, and I don’t like to waste physical copies of books if I don’t plan on keeping them.

I always keep an eye out for books in translation, as that’s one of my many passions when it comes to reading. I went to graduate school and studied Global Humanities because I was curious about the world and its people, and wanted to understand it a little more. We’ll never truly understand the full magnitude of the world’s vibrant culture, but I like to think reading is also a tiny little microstep with every book I pick up.

I was given a copy of Everyone Leaves by the publisher, and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever read a Cuban author, which excited me. It was a quick read for me, and I finished it it in less than two days split over an hour and a half.

Let’s get into the review before this introduction is as long as the book!

As seen through one Cuban girl’s diaries throughout the 1970s and 1980s, girlhood can be turbulent.

This novel begins in 1978, and serves as a form of diary entries across the girlhood of a single girl as she comes of age. In 1978, her writing is awkward and janky, reflecting how young she really is, but it’s actually quite sad what we read. Young Nieve is torn between her parents in a post-revolutionary Cuba, and her mother, who works as a radio broadcaster and reporter of sorts, is sent away to Angola to cover war.

Nieve lives with her mother and her mother’s Swedish boyfriend at the beginning of the novel. Fausto, the boyfriend, takes care of her despite the language barrier, but when her mother returns from Angola and their Civil War, she’s not exactly mentally stable. Her mother saw some horrific things out there, which made her not in peak mental condition to take care of a kid.

So when her father, who despises her mother and Fausto, swoops in, he tries to take away Nieve. Their case goes to court, and Nieve, when asked to pick who she would rather live with, is unable to answer the court’s question. Her mother loses the case because she’s seen as mentally ill, and her father whisks her away to his theater troupe in the rural parts of Cuba.

However, Nieve’s upbringing there is even more turbulent, as her father literally will not even feed her anything or bring food into the house. Worst of all, he hits Nieve and leaves her bruised all over her body, which people ignore when she heads off to school and finds herself behind compared to all of her classmates.

Her only constant is her diary, which she dutifully records the days and what happened to her throughout the course of her time with her father. Eventually, she does end up back with her mother in her town, but Fausto, being a Swedish citizen, is forced to leave by the Cuban government.

We then transition to Nieve’s young adult years almost a decade later in the novel, which shows a different side of Cuba. Her mother packed up and had her move to Havana, despite them being forced to live in the slums, in hopes that it would give them both a better life. Nieve’s teenage years are full of art, as she attends the local art school, but she also is forced to participate in the state’s show of strength, including military camps.

This is a novel that very much has the state lurking in the background, whether the characters realize it or not. From Nieve’s father refusing to give permission for her to leave the country and go to Sweden to the military camp that the girls are forced to go to for a form of “education,” Everyone Leaves isn’t just about the emotional impacts of people leaving, but how the state forces this to basically happen becuase of the poor conditions its citizens are living under.

Overall Thoughts

While I did find the jump from childhood to adulthood a bit jarring in this novel, I can see why the author chose to make this decision from a writing standpoint. I do wish that we got the filler that happened in-between, even if it was a bit more mundane. These are diary entires, so we go from the late 1970s to almost the late 1980s, which is quite a big gap.

That said, this was such a fascinating novel to me. As mentioned before I had never read a novel by a Cuban author before, only listened to Cuban music, so when I was reading this I was really curious about this period of time in Cuban history. I know very basic Cuban history, but I’ve been wanting to go to Cuba—maybe this is a sign I should learn more and visit in the near future.

Anyways, I enjoyed this novel, but I didn’t find it to be one of my favorites. The second half of the novel was more interesting to me, even though the synopsis really pushes the first half with her parents. But to understand someone as an adult, we need to see their childhood and past, so I get it.

Read this if you’re interested or compelled by the synopsis! I think you’ll find it worth it, so find a copy at your local library or indie bookstore when you get the chance.

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