Cages

by Chantel Acevedo

Cages is a sweeping, polyphonic portrait of a man seen through the eyes of those who loved him, feared him, and betrayed him. At its center is Felix--a zookeeper in 1960s Cuba, an exile in London, and finally a dying man in Miami. His story is pieced together like a puzzle that can never fully be solved by one who knew him only as an absence and seeks to know him before it is too late. In Cuba, Felix tends to animals he cannot fully protect any more than he could protect his own family. In London, he is a man running from his failures who falls in love with a woman as fierce as the lions he once fed. In Miami, Felix is a father who never quite figured out how to be a father. Chantel Acevedo's masterful novel is at once a family saga, a meditation on displacement and freedom, and a love story.