La Finca, Love, Loss, and Laundry on a Tiny Puerto Rican Island Caribe, by Corky Parker: A must-read adventure of determination and love.

I will confess that when I finished reading La Finca, Love, Loss, and Laundry on a Tiny Puerto Rican Island by Corky Parker, I felt a pang of pain and a sense of emptiness: how would I do now without the incredible adventures that Corky had been sharing with me for the past days?

La Finca has been my first audiobook. And I think that listening to Corky’s voice delivering the amazing story of her life has added zest to the already incredible events that have marked her path. Born in Northern California, Corky decides to buy a finca in Vieques, a little Puerto Rican island, with her husband and children.

Starting from that moment the story of the finca develops alongside the life of Corky, which is marked by incredible events spanning from having to regulate a debt with a Chinese criminal organisation to facing the depression of her husband and then a divorce. What has impressed me from the very beginning of the book is the determination and the love that Corky and her family put into this finca; it’s funny to read all the adventures that they go through while trying to make things work in a place where they don’t know how things work.

I was positively surprised by the amount of flexibility and intercultural competency that Corky shows in facing the countless problems linked to her finca, both when she’s physically present and when she is back in the United States. Problems that go from the most practical ones, caused by bad construction methods, poor materials or weather conditions, to the presence of the rarest animals that you might imagine, to the relationships with people that surround La Finca Caribe in various roles. At one point the book acquires a thriller-like taste: one problem solved, you wonder what will come next.

The series of managers that follow one another on the finca and that fail to stay for the most indescribable reasons can make you laugh or cry depending on how you see it and on how Corky reacts to it.

Overall, I must say that I found her ability to absorb the culture of the place and to adapt to it quite astonishing.

The tale of these stories is interspersed by funny moments told with a big amount of humour, and sad ones, where you feel like standing beside Corky and feeling her sense of loss at all the overwhelming events that touch the finca.

Mingling personal life and feelings with facts concerning the island of Puerto Rico and the incredible variety of characters that revolve around these finca adventures, the book brings you to the bitter end when the finca is destroyed in 2017 by Hurricane Maria. That’s not the only tragedy that Corky had to face, though, and this sad epilogue really makes you wonder whether all the energy and motivation Corky has poured into this endeavour was worth the while.

The answer, in my view, is yes. It has been worth the while because through the finca Corky has experienced love in many, many ways. In the end, La Finca, Love, Loss, and Laundry on a Tiny Puerto Rican Island is a book about love, daring and believing. And about respect. Respect for a place that is different from yours, but that intrinsically becomes part of your story. Which is what many of us expats experience over and over again during the course of their lives.

You can buy La finca here – I warmly recommend it!
And here is the Finca’s website, with loads of lovely pictures!

Claudia Landini
Geneva, Switzerland
October 2023
All photos ©CorkyParker

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