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Read More: Book of the Month Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
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December 2014 Book of the Month
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho
By Anjanette Delgado
Published by Kensington
ISBN-13: 978-1617733901
“A thrilling, hilarious, and mysterious romp.” –Patricia Engel, author of It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris
Two divorces have taught Mariela Estevez that she’s better suited to being a mistress than a wife. Whose heart needs all that “forever after” trouble? Still, her affair with her married lover, Hector, has become problematic–especially because he’s also a tenant in her apartment building in the heart of Miami’s Calle Ocho in Little Havana. But when Hector is found dead just steps from Mariela’s back door, on the eve of her fortieth birthday, she’s forced to examine her life–and come up with a plan to save it, fast…
Complicating matters, Hector’s passing sparks the unexpected return of a gift Mariela rejected years ago and thought she’d never have to face again: clairvoyance. Suddenly, Mariela’s visions come swiftly and unbidden, as do revelations about her other tenants. Lost loves, hidden yearnings, old jealousies–all reside on Calle Ocho. Most of all, Mariela’s second sight awakens her not just to the truth about Hector’s death and the secrets in others’ lives–but to the possibilities blooming within her own.
With warmth, wit, and insight, award-winning author Anjanette Delgado explores one woman’s flawed but heartfelt attempt to live and love well, transporting readers to the center of contemporary Little Havana and a community of uniquely human, unforgettable characters.
“The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho reminds me of why I started reading in the first place–to be enchanted, to be carried away from my world and dropped into a world more vivid and incandescent. Anjanette Delgado loves her characters, even the miscreants, and makes us love them too.” –John Dufresne, author of No Regrets, Coyote
December 2014 Additional Conversation
A Cup of Water Under My Bed
By Daisy Hernandez
Published by Beacon Press
ISBN-13: 978-0807014486
A coming-of-age memoir by a Colombian-Cuban woman about shaping lessons from home into a new, queer life.
In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be “una india” instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy’s father is not godless. He’s simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa.
These lessons—rooted in women’s experiences of migration, colonization, y cariño—define in evocative detail what it means to grow up female in an immigrant home. In one story, Daisy sets out to defy the dictates of race and class that preoccupy her mother and tías, but dating women and transmen, and coming to identify as bisexual, leads her to unexpected questions. In another piece, NAFTA shuts local factories in her hometown on the outskirts of New York City, and she begins translating unemployment forms for her parents, moving between English and Spanish, as well as private and collective fears. In prose that is both memoir and commentary, Daisy reflects on reporting for the New York Times as the paper is rocked by the biggest plagiarism scandal in its history and plunged into debates about the role of race in the newsroom.
A heartfelt exploration of family, identity, and language, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter’s story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.