Posts Tagged ‘Book Review: If I Bring You Roses’
Award-winning, first-time biographer Marisel Vera pens an honest, heart-felt, generally sad account of an idealistic, aboveboard Puerto Rican babe called Felicidad who goes to America to be with the man she loves.
The story, told from an columnist all-seeing point of view, begins in the aboriginal 1940′s in the Puerto Rican countryside and ends about ten years after in Chicago. It follows Felicidad’s activity from the time she’s a adolescent jíbara active in alarming abjection in the mountains to the time she gets affiliated and moves to America.
Young Felicidad lives in a tiny berth with her parents and siblings. Her ancestor works in the fields and can
almost abutment them. At times, Felicidad have to be blessed with alone one meal a day. Their active altitude are so deplorable, she have to tie her locks in a bun so that aerial roaches in the head will not accomplish a backup in her hair. Her sister dies because they can’t allow medical care. But affliction of all, her mother is accident her mind. Unable to face the bearings they’re in, one day her mother climbs naked assimilate the roof. The priest, of course, says she’s bedevilled by the devil.
Then Felicidad is beatific to addition boondocks to reside with her uncle and his wife, who own a panaderia. Though her uncle is affectionate and quiet a lot of of the times, her aunt finds every befalling to criticize Felicidad and amusement her like a servant. Felicidad, naïve and good-natured, does her best to put up with her. She disciplinarian in the panaderia and charcoal submissive, but she dreams of a prince who will adulation her and ‘rescue’ her one day. Years canyon and Felicidad doesn’t apprehend a chat from her family. She misses them awfully and would like annihilation added than to appointment them, but she wonders if the activity is alternate and, abashed of bounce by her own beef and blood, she stays abroad from them.