Book Review: If I Bring You Roses, by Marisel Vera
Grant winning, first-time writer Marisel Vera pens a genuine, ardent, frequently pitiful story of a hopeful, gullible Puerto Rican young lady named Felicidad who goes to America to be with the man she cherishes.
The story, told according to a creator all-knowing perspective, starts in the mid 1940’s in the Puerto Rican open country and finishes around besticken lassen ten years after the fact in Chicago. It follows Felicidad’s life from the time she’s a youthful jíbara living in horrifying neediness in the mountains to the time she gets hitched and moves to America.
Youthful Felicidad lives in a minuscule shack with her folks and kin. Her dad works in the fields and can scarcely uphold them. On occasion, Felicidad should be content with just a single dinner daily. Their everyday environments are so regrettable, she should tie her secures a bun so that flying insects in the restroom won’t make a home in her hair. Her sister kicks the bucket since they can’t manage the cost of clinical consideration. In any case, to top it all off, her mom is flipping out. Incapable to confront the circumstance they’re in, one day her mom climbs stripped onto the rooftop. The minister, obviously, says she’s moved by Satan.
Then, at that point, Felicidad is shipped off one more town to live with her uncle and his significant other, who own a panaderia. However her uncle is caring and calm the vast majority of the occasions, her auntie finds each chance to condemn Felicidad and deal with her like a worker. Felicidad, guileless and easy going, gives a valiant effort to endure her. She slaves in the panaderia and stays accommodating, yet she longs for a ruler who will cherish her and ‘salvage’ her one day. A long time elapse and Felicidad doesn’t hear a word from her family. She misses them horribly and might want just to visit them, however she contemplates whether the inclination is responded and, scared of dismissal by her direct family, she avoids them.
At some point, an attractive man strolls into the panaderia and Felicidad is deeply inspired. Aníbal Acevedo, a man of the world to the extent ladies go, is taken by Felicidad’s blameless excellence. To everybody’s shock, a couple of days after the fact, he requests that she wed him. Felicidad is elated, loaded up with hopeful fantasies of satisfaction, however is Aníbal fit for satisfying his fantasies, when he has another lady hanging tight for him in Chicago?
Marisel Vera’s writing streams perfectly. In a capable, regularly dull way, she portrays the jíbaro. As it were, Felicidad’s story is a Cinderella story yet with a strange bend. The two heroes, Felicidad and Aníbal, come to survive the pages, every one so exceptionally unmistakable from the other. It is particularly interesting to be inside Aníbal’s psyche and see the world according to his viewpoint, a merciless difference to Felicidad. Their romantic tale is clashing. In any case, in particular, the creator provides us with a capably miserable look at the jíbaro in the 1950’s in Chicago, their troublesome lives and afflictions, the bias they needed to stand up to. Vera is certainly another Latina voice to be dealt with, and I anticipate perusing a greater amount of her work.
IF I BRING YOU ROSES