We were always there, simply not acknowledged by the dominant white cul-ture—neither our contributions nor our very existence.

I firmly believe Llanos-Figueroa writes a novel of the historical fiction genre, which the Puerto Rican literary canon has needed for quite some time since its foundational his-tory was defined by white, elitist male writers.

The principal plot that carries the novel is the trans-generational story of a family’s survival from slavery and the plantation system to the present, told via mothers to their daughters. The conscious effort to trace Puerto Rico’s history over time demonstrates that recovery work and revisionist history are at the center of this novel. The rich familial story told by matriarchs neces-sitates a stone, the titular stone, which functions as a carrier of family histo-ries by connecting daughters to their ancestors and ancestral lands. This may be considered a gesture towards Afrofuturism, which is a popular theme in afro-diasporic writing and captures a necessity of imagining Afro-diasporic possibilities and futurities, since the moments ‘in’ the ancestral planes directly impact the given daughter’s decisions about the future. Here, memory is cap-tured via the stone’s accessibility to the past and how it informs the present. I firmly believe Llanos-Figueroa writes a novel of the historical fiction genre, which the Puerto Rican literary canon has needed for quite some time since its foundational history was defined by white, elitist male writers. Since then, mostly upper-class and white Puerto Ricans have contributed to the meanings and conceptualizations of Puerto Rican culture and identity.

While this is a fictionalized text, Llanos-Figueroa frames Puerto Ri-can history as Black history through the depiction of the island’s economic growth and dependence on slavery and the plantation system. And, she al-ludes to the trauma, violence, and pain suffered by slaves while also suggest-ing how gendered violence led to pregnancies, children, and abuses unique to female slaves. This storytelling is essentially a way the women keep their stories alive and educate their children on their family’s (and the island’s) history. In a way, the stone that is bequeathed to every daughter is an archive of family secrets, legacies, and a dispatch into an Afrofuturistic past that al-