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Showing posts from September, 2019

TAINA BY ERNESTO QUINONEZ

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. TAINA by  Ernesto Quiñonez Vintage Another virgin birth? In Spanish Harlem?   Could be.   TAINA is full of magical realism, revolution and redemption. And the best part, this novel is available in English and Spanish. Happy Reading. SUMMARY:   When Julio, a teenager living in Spanish Harlem, hears that Taina, a pregnant fifteen-year-old from his high school claims to be a virgin, he decides to believe her. Julio has a history of strange visions and his blind and unrequited love for Taina will unleash a whirlpool of emotions that will bring him to question his hard-working Puerto Rican mother and his communist Ecuadorian father, his beliefs and even the building blocks of modern science (after seeing the conception of Taina’s baby as a revolution in nature).   After mee

TRACING THE HORSE BY DIANA MARIE DELGADO

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. BOA Editions TRACING THE HORSE By Diana Marie Delgado Diane Marie Delgado’s long awaited collection of poems are to be read “for feeling’ in a world gone one-dimensional.”   This is her story – her coming of age.   It’s the story of family, violence, loneliness and addiction. There is no filter, just a stark vulnerability that captures her readers’ attention and hearts. SUMMARY:   Set in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, Diana Marie Delgado’s debut poetry collection follows the coming-of-age of a young Mexican-American woman trying to make sense of who she is amidst a family and community weighted by violence and addiction. With bracing vulnerability, the collection chronicles the effects of her father’s drug use and her brother’s incarceration, asking the reader

BARELY MISSING EVERYTHING BY MATT MENDEZ

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. Antheneum/ Caitlyn Dlouhy Books BARELY MISSING EVERYTHING By Matt Mendez “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”    Fabi, her son Juan and his best friend JD find this out the hard way. They all had other plans for themselves, but life proved cruel and merciless. They are hoping for one last shot at their dreams…maybe. SUMMARY:   Juan has plans. He's going to get out of El Paso, Texas, on a basketball scholarship and make something of himself--or at least find something better than his mom Fabi's cruddy apartment, her string of loser boyfriends, and a dead dad. Basketball is going to be his ticket out, his ticket up. He just needs to make it happen. His best friend JD has plans, too. He's going to be a filmmaker one day, like Quinten T

DAUGHTERS OF THE STONE BY DAHLMA LLANOS-FIGUEROA

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX  HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. Ingram Spark DAUGHTERS OF THE STONE By Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa Vibrant. Lyrical. Powerful.  DAUGHTERS OF THE STONE follows five generations of Puerto Rican women on their  physical and spiritual journey from the Old World to the New. SUMMARY:   It is the mid-1800s. Fela , taken from Africa, is working at her second sugar plantation in colonial Puerto Rico, where her mistress is only too happy to benefit from her impressive embroidery skills. But Fela has a secret. Before she and her husband were separated and sold into slavery, they performed a tribal ceremony in which they poured the essence of their unborn child into a very special stone. Fela keeps the stone with her, waiting for the chance to finish what she started. When the plantation owner approaches her, Fela s

DOMINICANA BY ANGIE CRUZ

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX HERITAGE MONTH every day. But to honor Latino / Latinx authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book and author every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. Flatiron Books DOMINICANA by Angie Cruz SUMMARY:   Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn’t matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year’s Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan’s free-spirited younger brother, who co

THIS AMERICAN AUTOPSY: POEMS BY JOSE ANTONIO RODRIGUEZ

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor Latino / Latinx authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book and author every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. University of Oklahoma Press THIS AMERICAN AUTOPSY: POEMS By Josè Antonio Rodríguez SUMMARY:   In this powerful collection of free-verse poetry, immigrant, poet, and memoirist José Antonio Rodríguez encapsulates the experiences of an artist and citizen caught between two worlds. At once deeply personal and thematically expansive, these works offer a bracing look at the darker impulses of contemporary America. Saturated with allusions to family, immigration, sexuality, and violence,  This American Autopsy   is also an unsettling meditation on life and death. With its provocative title, the collection calls to mind an image of our nation as a body awaiting examination to determine the cause of death. In this scenario the poet vacillates between va

UNBROKEN BY DR. EGLI COLON STEPHENS & NATALIA HARRIS

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX  HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor Latino / Latinx authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book and author every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. Kindle Direct Publishing UNBROKEN: A Mother-Daughter Journey of Resilience, Faith and Courage By Dr. Egli Colón Stephens and  professional model Natalia Harris Egli and Natalia are personal friends. They have been working hard and diligently on this book for a few years.   We are so happy that their dream has come True! The book is done and being shared with all.   Natalia is healthy and featured in Delta’s newest ad campaign, and Egli is following her daughter into modeling. This dynamic duo will be appearing at the New York’s National Opera Center on Friday, September 20, at 7:30pm.   It’s a Free Book Launch Party.   All are welcome.   Visit them at www.eglicolonstephens.com. SUMMARY:  UNBROKEN is a hope-filled story of a mother an

LATINX HERITAGE MONTH CELEBRATION BEGINS WITH CONEY ISLAND SIREN BY THERESA VARELA

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX  HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor Latino / Latinx authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book and author every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. Pollen Press Publishing CONEY ISLAND SIREN By Theresa Varela SUMMARY:    Call it coincidence or call it fate when Maggie Fuentes, rummaging through a Coney Island flea market, stumbles upon a a handwritten diary whose author, a young girl of the nineteenth century names Ellen, reveals dreadful secrets that parallel Maggie's own. Maggie sinks deep into the sinister maelstrom of her lover, Police Officer Frank Ramirez, until the stark urgency of lines written by a kindred spirit compel her to confront the reality of her- and their- lives. Far removed from each other in time but bonded by the white-capped ocean, amusement park locale, and converging torments, it seems particularly apt that the sleight-of-hand landscape of luck and chance provides t

BOOK OF THE MONTH: THE OTHER SIDE BY JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS

The Latina Book Club is proud to announce it's September Book of the Month, THE OTHER SIDE , by award-winning Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos.   This collection of stories could have been ripped right out of the current headlines.  These are stories that must be read, must be shared. Happy Reading. Farrar, Straus & Giroux You can't really tell what time it is when you're in the freezer. Fear. Despair. Hopefulness. Reunions. Separations. Villalobos shines a glaring light on the current immigration and asylum policy in the United States. It's an emotional, gut-wrenching, and vivid portrayal of border-life today. SUMMARY:  Every year, thousands of migrant children and teens cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The journey is treacherous and sometimes deadly, but worth the risk for migrants who are escaping gang violence and poverty in their home countries. And for those refugees who  do  succeed? They face an immigration process that is as

SEPTEMBER BOOK RELEASES

The Latina Book Club is excited about the new books being released this month.   There are debuts, thrillers, coming of age stories, poetry, science fiction, and more.   Below are some of the new releases.  As we know of more, we will post.   Happy Reading! TRACING THE HORSE Poems by Diana Marie Delgado BOA Editions Limited Set in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, Diana Marie Delgado’s debut poetry collection follows the coming-of-age of a young Mexican-American woman trying  to make sense of who she is amidst a family and community weighted by violence and addiction. DOMINICANA by Angie Cruz Flatiron Books Amid unrest in Dominican Republic, 15-year old Ana marries a man twice her age to get to New York City.  Married life proves anything but happy and Ana has a lot of growing up to do. BECOMING BEATRIZ by Tami Charles Charlesbridge Teen Beatriz' just wants to be a professional dancer and get out of h