BOOK REVIEW: FLORES AND MISS PAULA
MELISSA RIVERO
Ecco Books
2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327249-1
At thirty-something, sharing an apartment with her mother, Paula, is not Flores’ idea of adulthood, freedom or independence. But now that Paula is a widow, Flores must find a way to help her mother cope with the loss of her husband and move on. At the same time, Flores has to deal with her own grief at losing her father, while trying to launch her life and career.
Mother and daughter attempt to support each other and get along, but their choices and understanding of life often clash. Paula wants her daughter to find a nice young man, marry and settle down. Flores wishes her mother would admit when she’s wrong and apologize. She would also prefer to see her mother choose best friends that aren’t always married men.
And she’s never sure if her latest headache is induced by her mother.
When a situation arises that they have to move out of their current apartment, the two women must decide if they should each go their separate ways, or if they can find a way to live together and create a mutual future with new hopes and dreams.
Flores is every child that values the sacrifices of their immigrant parents to create a better life for them. But she also longs to forge her own new path. The challenge is how to go forward without losing the past that she still values and which holds part of her identity.
Paula is every mother who wants a happy and better life for her daughter, but is unskilled at navigating the minefield of when to hang on and when to let go. And as an immigrant, and a widow, she must find the resources within herself to start a new life; whatever that may look like.
Both women struggle to make past and present converge into something new without losing the essential essence of who they are, and where they came from, while they explore their future destinations. The question is, Can they grow together? Or will they grow apart?
A story of loss, forgiveness, and love, Flores and Miss Paula, is a down-to-earth novel of learning what it means to be family, building a new life in a new country, and the tender yet sometimes frustrating relationship between a mother and a daughter.
Veronica Jorge
See you next time on September 22nd!
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When you love someone, you want to know everything about them. That someone, in this case, was my maternal grandmother. We shared a close bond, but there was a wrinkle on the face-map of her life that I could not trace. I wish I had asked her my questions while she was still with me.
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The Many Colors of Us: Remembering 9/11
by Veronica JorgeMost people are a combination of various cultures, though I think their ancestors tended to confine their marriages to one continent.
Mine didn’t.
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A story of second-chances, hope, friendship, gratitude, and yes, the redeeming power of love, A Slight Change of Plans, satisfies at many levels. As the title suggests, things may not always work out the way we plan or expect. Colby encourages us to believe that there is a good plan for our lives, and a Master Planner who knows how to put all of the pieces together in the right place if we would only trust Him and let Him.
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The world’s treasures, many of them at your fingertips, in the pages of a book.
Such was my experience during a recent museum visit when I discovered an inspiring and uplifting work of art, Girl Balancing Knowledge, by the sculptor Yinka Shonibare. A British-Nigerian artist, he explores themes of cultural identity in a globalized world. The bright colors of the African Ankara fabrics he uses in his pieces are appealing and strikingly eye catching.
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Below is an excerpt from one of our 2024 mentees, Veronica Jorge, from her project, Crushed Like Sugarcane, based on her Chinese ancestor, Zhou Zhijian, who left China to work in the sugarcane fields of Cuba where he was enslaved. In this portion, newly arrived and unwilling to accept the situation, he decides to escape:
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