Bernard Campbell, a well-known and unscrupulous behavior therapist from glamorous Miami Beach comes up with the absurd idea of organizing a psychological retreat to study and speculate with his patients about the similarities and differences, if any, between the American and Hispanic cultures and to evaluate if we are on the verge of conforming a new society populated by Americanized Latinos or vice versa. He gathers twelve enigmatic elements, six women and six men, half of them pure bred Americans and half of them recent Hispanic immigrants, to observe them as they interact and share life experiences in a dynamic session of fifteen hours. From the beginning, both sides clash in confrontations mostly inspired by basic human small-mindedness that have very little to do with their ethnic backgrounds. The therapist manages to come up with an unexplainable hoax to keep them prisoners for an uncertain period of time. At the impossibility of leaving the premises, their highest and lowest virtues collide and they disconnect from each other in micro communities. They learn that when they judge other people, there is no time left to love them and the reason why compassion is so unpopular and discrimination so fashionable. Cuckoo Heart is a story, sometimes hilarious others dramatic, about immigrants, human behavior, tolerance, sex and cultural integration in Miami Beach; coming to prove that we are all very much alike and differences are not deep; and at the end, we all share a common denominator: we are always willing to mate and always willing to kill.
About the Author: Manuel Montenegro's first novel comes after 40 years of seeing instead of saying. This photographer-cinematographer-adventurer-tightrope walker-burlesque performer spent his entire life without a clear purpose but observing the world around him and capturing it, for better or for worse, in still and moving pictures. Nevertheless, he learned that things were not as gorgeous as they looked nor as hideous as they might have been documented for human eyes. Manuel Montenegro has performed an unconventional life filled with light, images and scenes; becoming an impartial witness to the beauty of a world traumatized by science and greed. His legacy was once captured on film and digital media; and, today, when he thinks he knows people, he portrays the sloppiness of life as it is, in pants down conversation; helping us realize how much fun it could be if we mastered the neglected talent of laughing at ourselves.