Summary: This book is written from the point of view of at least four different people. The main people that the book focuses on are Fredrika, Elena, and Cecilia. There are also a couple of times when the point of view of Cecilia’s husband, Beni, is covered.
Fredrika is a woman that travels from Sweden to Cuba, she’s an advocate for women’s rights, and leaves her upper-society life in Sweden to travel the world.
Elena is a young upper-class girl in Cuba, whose family host Fredrika, she at first can’t understand the freedom that Fredrika and Cecilia find together traveling the countryside of Cuba.
Once she gets a taste of it though she finds herself feeling trapped in her life. Cecilia is a pregnant, enslaved, and married African teenager, that is longing for her home in Africa.
With Fredrika she finds a freedom that she didn’t have before Fredrika arrives. The point of view of Beni, Cecilia’s husband is almost as if he’s finally noticing and worrying about his young wife because of her finding freedom with Fredrika.
The book is called Firefly letters, because of the activity that the three women participate in during the night. At night fireflies come out, people capture them, and keep them in jars. Fredrika, Elena, and Cecilia go around trading and buying the fireflies from the people and let them go back into the sky.
Throughout the book, there’s this underlying sadness for Cecilia, because she wants to buy her baby’s freedom, but she doesn’t have the type of money that it takes to do that, but she’s also longing for her homeland.
The ending of the book is the best part, I’m not going to spoil it but it’s the happiest part of the book, and reading it made me happy for them.
Critique: Out of all the books that I read for the Notable Books for Global Society this one is my absolute favorite.
Not only was it historically accurate and incorporated those elements into the book. I really liked the book because it was the point of view of three very different women.
Elena, the young girl who had been told she had to be a certain way all her life. Cecilia, the pregnant slave girl that only want her baby to be free and go back to her homeland. Fredrika, the woman that seems so adventurous and free, but also loves a man in Sweden that she feels she can’t be with because he’ll take away her freedom. It was fun to read, honestly.
I’d recommend it. I don’t think that Cecilia’s husband’s perspective was necessary. Everything that the author wrote that was from her husband, Beni’s, perspective was something that was already expressed through Cecilia so adding him was kind of counter productive to the plot. If his perspective had been given from the beginning it might have been better but because it wasn’t added until the middle/end of the book he didn’t really add anything to the book that hadn’t already been expressed.
Strengths and Weaknesses: This books strength is that it allows the reader not only to see the viewpoint and struggles of Fredrika, who is the main person of the story, but also allows the reader to see the viewpoint of two other women from different social statuses.
The weakness, or one thing that I didn’t really like about the book was the way that Fredrika talked about her home life and how she grew up in upper class, but she didn’t know how she could help Cecilia.
That’s the only thing that really got to me, because here is a woman who is travelling the world, but she can’t think of a way to help this girl that has come to be her friend?
Use in Classroom: This is the perfect book to highlight a section on Multicultural literature or even for a section of history about women’s right and slavery.
I can imagine using it to supplement the textbook information about women’s rights and slavery because it showcases Fredrika’s freedom because she’s a foreigner, the rules that Elena is expected to follow as a part of the women in society, and the lack of freedom that both Cecilia and Beni experience as slaves. The ideal activity for this book would be to start a class discussion about the book and have different students talk about the restrictions and freedoms that each person experienced that’s in line with what was learned from the text book.
- Goodreads rating – 3.94
- FEEDBACK – Dorothy