Araujo’s Stone

Araujo’s Stone
Peter Roderick
Turnkey Press
ISBN: 0-9754803-9-1
Fiction, Contemporary, Cultural
Reviewed by Dr. Tami Brady

At age eighteen, Augustino Araujo left his native island Fogo to live in Cape Verde. Here the man lived out the rest of his life as a God fearing man and outstanding member of the community. He never married and seemed for the most part to not even enjoy his life. Few people, including Araujo’s nephew Santiago Joseph Antone (Tiago) ever really knew the more about this man than this surface image. In fact, though Araujo had taken Tiago in after the boy’s mother died, the only emotional attachments Tiago had for the man who raised him was intense anger and resentment.
Araujo’s Stone surprised me. It’s not often that the main character of the book is dead before the story even begins. Moreover, the characters in this book act and sound like real people in their reactions to Araujo’s death and to each other. We don’t all react the same way to grief and often our actions are more based upon unhealed emotional scars rather than logic. It’s refreshing to read a book in which the characters don’t necessarily act the way that we are expected to act in such situations. This book is so realistic and so bizarre that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t based upon a real life story.