THE LATINA BOOK CLUB

Al jibaro nunca se le quita la mancha de platano. A jibaro can never wash away the stain of the plantain .                         -Esmeralda Santiago Vintage, 1990 If you are Puerto Rican, you have probably heard of Esmeralda Santiago.  She is the author that gave Puerto Ricans a face and a voice.  She is every Boricua – torn between two cultures, two languages, two identities.  Which is the real Esmeralda? The answer is another question – why can’t she be both? Esmeralda’s WHEN I WAS PUERTO RICAN is the first of three memoirs that take readers from the pueblitos of the small Caribbean island to the big city in Manhattan.  Esme’s new life is full of challenges, discoveries and dualities.  In fact, the original version of the novel had two parts  –  Puerto Rico and America.  Esmeralda is both Puerto Rican ...

Vintage Books  1985 Think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself. —Florentino This novel by Gabriel García Márquez seems very apropos for this time. We are under a pandemic, and the protagonists in this historic novel are under their own pandemic.   Of course, it takes 50+ years before the boy gets the girl, but love is forever. Some readers have problems with Florentino.   He seems an obsessive Don Juan – bedding everything with breasts—and yet still insists that he is a “virgin,” that he only has one love. Is it because Fermina is the one who got away, or because she is the other half of his soul? Readers have been battling over this question for over 50 years, and will probably continue to do so for another 50.   Read it again and let us know where you stand.   Happy Reading.—mcf LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA (EL AMOR EN LOS TIEMPOS DE COLERA) was first published in 1985. It...

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 nat...

    Vintage Books All is not lost. The future remains unwritten. It is ours to shape.       ---Carolina De Robertis Love not hate makes America great Fight for Democracy / Fight like a girl I’m with her & her & her & her & her & her & her & her & her & her Viva la vulva We can we will I have been to the future and                                         We won Resist defend love The seas are rising but so are we         ---signs from the Women’s March on DC The Latina Book Club has chosen RADICAL HOPE , an anthology of letters of “Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times” as its Book of the Month.  This anthology, edited by author and activist C...

    Vintage International “For men it is just a ‘stupid mistake.’ For women, it feels like a spiritual crime against all those who surround her with affection and support her as a mother and wife.” —Linda "Today I am a woman torn between the terror that everything might change and the equal terror that everything might carry on exactly the same for the rest of my days.” – Linda Paulo Coelho’s new book, ADULTERY (or ADULTERIA in Spanish) is out now.  The title seems to tell the whole story – a bored housewife who has an affair  –  but does it really?   Look at the two quotes above.  They are at the very heart of our protagonist's angst. Linda has a grand life that many would envy.  She has money, a good husband, two kids, an exciting job as a journalist, servants and lives in beautiful Switzerland. She has it all, don’t you think? That’s what Coelho wants the reader to do—Think.  He wants us to see behind the trap...