The author
The story behind Mahala
Carol Marques Barrios writes about women who decided their lives were their own, starting with the one in her own family.
Meet Carol
How Mahala came to be written
Carol Marques Barrios spent twenty-five years as a stay-at-home mother before going back to work on something of her own. Mahala, her first novel, is based on the life of her paternal grandmother, a girl of Indian descent in colonial St. Vincent who was given as a baby to her mother’s best friend, raised next door to her own brothers and sisters, and who refused, at thirteen, the husband four parents had chosen for her.
Carol first heard the story at her grandmother’s kitchen table. Her grandmother was in her eighties by then, and still smiled when she got to the part where she spat in her suitor’s eye. In 2024, almost a hundred years after her grandmother left St. Vincent, Carol traveled to the island and found her family’s ship manifest in the National Archives.
Carol is a graduate of the University of Connecticut, where she earned a BS in marketing and an MBA. She lives in Fairfield, Connecticut with her husband and three daughters, and she visits book clubs by video.
“To this day, I still can’t walk by Coty face powder without stealing a whiff from the artfully decorated orange and gold canister. Every time I do, it brings back the scent of her.”
Carol, from the Author’s Note
Before you read
Content Note
Mahala is suitable for adult and older-teen readers and for library and book-club programming. It opens on recurrent miscarriage and infertility grief, and its heart is a child given away by agreement between two families. There is no on-page sexual content, no graphic violence, and no profanity of note.
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Get the stories that didn’t fit in the book
The real history behind Mahala, straight from Carol: the ship manifests, the photographs, and the women whose nerve she inherited.