A generous memoir that will endear audiences to the people, the lands, and the languages that Wheeler loves.
Maya Angelou famously observed, “The ache for home lives in all of us — the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” It’s a beautiful sentiment that begs the difficult question: what is home? For Eva Michelle Wheeler, home is a fluid concept that shifts with enlightenment, deepens through experience, and only clearly emerges after a great deal of soul-searching and globe-trotting. Her memoir, Alfacinha, is a vibrant travelogue that pulses with the life of every city she visits. Composed in a non-chronological format, the story leaps across continents, countries, and careers, mirroring the inquisitive spirit of the author. With a cadence that shifts from bright, contemporary casualness to passages of sumptuous, poetic detail, the dynamic style anchors readers in every important text exchange or charming Lisbon café. Significantly, Wheeler doesn’t shy away from the shadows of history. Her reflections on the lasting impact of the transatlantic slave trade in Portugal, Cape Verde, and elsewhere lend the memoir a sobering gravity and contemplative tone.
Propelled by a curiosity that cannot be quenched, Eva Michelle Wheeler’s search for freedom and belonging takes her from California’s suburbs to Tunisia’s multicultural capital to an island country off the west coast of Africa. Audiences will relate to the author as she comes to terms with perfectionism and learns to be less achievement-driven, falls in and out of love, and learns a few hard lessons about how the world works. Her experiences swing between the highs of a custard tart with a dear friend in Portugal and the lows of a toxic relationship many years in the making, but always come back to her evolving sense of safety, belonging, and love. Readers don’t have to come close to the author’s impressive resume of 60 countries stamped in a passport, dominating two separate professional careers before reaching 30, carrying $2200 handbags, or speaking five languages to understand the yearning for meaningful travel and that comforting feeling of fitting where we are. The book treats home as a sensation you grow into, not something you inherit, and the author writes of her travels the same way. Her adventure isn’t tourism, but the freedom discovered in movement, a love not only for the places she passes through but for the version of herself that emerges. A book about finding our center, Alfacinha is a generous memoir that will endear audiences to the people, the lands, and the languages that Wheeler loves.
