Coconuts for the Saint

On a blue street in Puerto Rico, Maria Elena fainted. A baker named Sandrofo Codero Lucero revived her with morsels of sweet wedding cake. So begins the love affair that is to take Maria Elena into the life of the enigmatic widower and his triplet daughters.

Sandrofo came to the island from America ten years before to start a new life in the bakery with his children. In all this time he has not taken a lover. Maria Elena resolves to find out why. When her questions to Sandrofo are greeted with silence, Maria Elena turns to the girls - Tata, "The Star of the Three," Melone, "The Smart One," and Beatriz, "The Quiet One" - for help in reconstructing the past.

She realizes that if she wants to learn about their father, she will first have to hear the daughters' own stories. The search for Sandrofo also involves Rayovac Rodriquez, the "self-appointed gadfly of the tropics" whose unrequited love for one of the triplets pushes him to tragedy; Sister Perez, psychic and spiritual counselor who cannot find Sandrofo in the Book of Names; and Angelo Marti, the local crazy who each year assumes the personality of a different townsperson.

In Coconuts for the Saint, Debra Spark has written a powerfully involving novel that explores the conflict between the notion that identity is fate and the idea that fate is identity. In resolving that question, the characters come to a more sympathetic understanding of each other, of the role love plays in the formation of character and of the inescapable nature of self.