DAUGHTER OF A PROMISE

The story of David and Bathsheba is reprised in Blasberg’s novel charting the love affair between a young Cuban woman from Miami and her powerful corporate boss.

Betsabé Ruiz is a high achiever from Little Havana, Miami—she wins a scholarship to a private college in New York, then is picked for job training at a high-powered investment bank in the city. After a shaky start, she comes into her strengths and becomes the protege, then lover, of the widowed Robert David (known simply as “David”), a charismatic financial legend. She becomes pregnant; “Bets” is the first-person narrator, relating her experiences to the child in her womb. Those who know the David and Bathsheba story, in which the biblical couple’s first child dies as a punishment for their sin but the second, Solomon, becomes one of the great kings of Israel, will easily connect the dots. This is a wonderfully wise book. Blasberg is an accomplished writer, and in Betsabé Ruiz she has created an insightful and strong young woman. The author has a gift for imagery and metaphor, as seen when Bets reflects on David’s solicitousness, “as if he might be offering his hand to a novice gymnast crossing the balance beam,” a perfect evocation of the high-stress career that she is embarking on, not to mention a seduction that readers know is in the cards. David is the mentor, many years her senior, but, in the end, it is clearly Bets who is the real teacher; the book is, among other things, a testament to women’s deeper insights, like those of Bets’ wise grandmother, Yaya (“If Yaya was alive, she’d say doctors have no idea, that babies come when they are good and ready”). Of course, Bets and David are hardly the only characters—side plots abound with young people on the make in the Big Apple, caroming like bumper cars.

A sagacious and graceful modern-day retelling of a biblical love story.