Publication Date: August 6, 2024
When Marina’s father summons her to their Croatian island from New York—and away from her evaporating marriage—to help him save his failing cheese factory, she must face her rocky past and an uncertain future.
How do you begin again when the past threatens to drown you?
In the throes of an unraveling marriage, New Yorker Marina Maržić returns to her native Croatian island where she helps her father with his struggling cheese factory, Sirana. Forced to confront her divided Croatian-American identity and her past as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, Marina moves in with her parents on Pag and starts a new life working at Sirana. As she gradually settles back into a place that was once home, her life becomes inextricably intertwined with their island’s cheese. When her past with the son of a rival cheesemaker stokes further unrest on their divided island, she must find a way to save Sirana—and in the process, learn to belong on her own terms.
Exploring underlying cultural and ethnic tensions in a complex region mired in centuries of war and turmoil, The Cheesemaker’s Daughter takes us through the year before Croatia joins the European Union. On the dramatic moonscape island of Pag, we are transported to strikingly barren vistas, medieval towns, and the mesmerizing Adriatic Sea, providing a rare window into a tight-knit community with strong family ties in a corner of the world where divisions are both real and imagined. Asking questions central to identity and the meaning of home, this richly drawn story reckons with how we survive inherited and personal traumas, and what it means to heal and reinvent oneself in the face of life’s challenges.
Author Kristin Vuković flies Marina from America back to her homeland of Pag Island in The Cheesemaker’s Daughter. Here, she will reconnect, start again, and attempt to resurrect her family’s cheese factory and reputation.
Opening the novel to note the dedication page and a map of Croatia and Pag Island, I knew this would take my mind to an unfamiliar place as the author had a personal connection to the setting. How interesting! I hoped the novel lived up to its setting.
Marina was sent to America as a teen in 1995 as the war between Serbs and Croats continued. Although understanding her father’s decision to remove her from harm’s way, it inadvertently removed her from remaining completely Croatian in the eyes of her neighbors. Now, returning to help her family, she feels like an outsider.
It has been over 15 years. She has married and has a career in New York. But leaving the big city and heading to her small community doesn’t feel like a sacrifice to her. She wants to find where she belongs because she feels adrift. She hopes throwing herself into the complicated business of resurrecting her father’s cheese factory after years of neglect after the war will demonstrate her true worth.
Marina has left behind her on-the-rocks marriage and soon faces the love she was forced to leave. She reunites with a deeply bonded friend from their school days of carving out a childhood during such traumatic times and finds a connection with a woman who just may help her sort out troubles, both personal and professional. Balancing relationships and finding the factory’s rebirth created a storyline that was easy and interesting to follow.
The novel also intertwines much history about the crisis in Croatia. The historical details had great significance to the plot but were included in a way to keep the reader moving forward. These historical details, told through Marina’s memories, open the reader to experiences of disruption, separation, sacrifice, and personal and family strength faced by many around the world then and now. As Marina fights to save the cheese factory from the war’s effects, we learn of the love and care given to the art of cheese making.
In a literary journey to Croatia, Kristin Vuković tells a story of family and new beginnings with delicious imagery of cheese making in The Cheesemaker’s Daughter.
Kristin Vuković has written for the New York Times, BBC Travel, Travel + Leisure, Coastal Living, Virtuoso, The Magazine, Hemispheres, the Daily Beast, AFAR, Connecticut Review, and Public Books, among others. An early excerpt of her novel was longlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue Inaugural Fiction Prize. She was named a “40 Under 40” honoree by the National Federation of Croatian Americans Cultural Foundation, and received a Zlatna Penkala (Golden Pen) award for her writing about Croatia. Kristin holds a BA in literature and writing and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and was Editor-in-Chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and currently resides in New York City with her husband and daughter.
I have read the book and highly recommend it. Kristin is a wonderful storyteller and opens the door to Croatian history.