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A Cafecito Story is a story of love, coffee, birds and hope. It is a beautifully written eco-fable by best-selling author Julia Alvarez. Based on her and her husband's experiences trying to reclaim a small coffee farm in her native Dominican Republic, A Cafecito Story shows how the return to the traditional methods of shade-grown coffee can rehabilitate and rejuvenate the landscape and human culture, while at the same time preserving vital winter habitat for threatened songbirds.Not a political or environmental polemic, A Cafecito Story is instead a poetic, modern fable about human beings at their best. The challenge of producing coffee is a remarkable test of our ability to live more sustainably, caring for the land, growers, and consumers in an enlightened and just way. Written with Julia Alvarez's deft touch, this is a story that stimulates while it comforts, waking the mind and warming the soul like the first cup of morning coffee. Indeed, this story is best read with a strong cup of organic, shade-grown, fresh-brewed coffee.… (more)
User reviews
Joe is the son of Nebraska
Joe buys a parcel of land, and, with another grower, forms a cooperative. Others join them. But they do more than grow coffee the "old-fashioned" way. They promote literacy, and sustainability.
There is also a love story here, not, they are careful to say, the story of Alvarez and her husband, but I think there is something of them in Joe and "the woman behind the counter".
There is an afterword by Bill Eichner about their coffee farm, as well as a list of resources.
The woodcuts by Dominican artist Belkis Ramírez are wonderful. I especially like the one of "the woman behind the counter", as she sits with the steam from the coffee rising, and her hair, flowing out and upwards, has visions of a coffee farm in its curls.