Is your New Year’s resolution to read more or to join a book club? Sententia Vera suggests Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club for a diverse and unique group of titles, authors and readers. As a partnership between Las Comadres and the Association of American Publishers (AAP), this book club promotes reading Latino authors, all-time favorites, as well as emerging writers. Take a look at their 2013 book selections thus far. Membership is open to everyone. And, most of the books are also available in Spanish.
Sententia Vera is happy to see one of our recently reviewed titles on this list!
2013 Book Club Selections
January 2013 | Have You Seen Marie?
By Sandra Cisneros
Pub: Random House Inc.
Pub Date: October 2012
ISBN: 9780307597946
$15.75 USD | Hardcover
The internationally acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street gives us a deeply moving tale of loss, grief, and healing: a lyrically told, richly illustrated fable for grown-ups about a woman’s search for a cat who goes missing in the wake of her mother’s death.
The word “orphan” might not seem to apply to a fifty-three-year-old woman. Yet this is exactly how Sandra feels as she finds herself motherless, alone like “a glove left behind at the bus station.” What just might save her is her search for someone else gone missing: Marie, the black-and-white cat of her friend, Roz, who ran off the day they arrived from Tacoma. As Sandra and Roz scour the streets of San Antonio, posting flyers and asking everywhere, Have you seen Marie? the pursuit of this one small creature takes on unexpected urgency and meaning. With full-color illustrations that bring this transformative quest to vivid life, Have You Seen Marie? showcases a beloved author’s storytelling magic, in a tale that reminds us how love, even when it goes astray, does not stay lost forever.
February 2013 | 8 Ways to Say “I Love My Life!”
By Josefina Lopez
Pub: Arte Publico Press
Pub Date: November 2012
ISBN: 9781558857544
$12.72 USD | Paperback
“If you don’t do anything, nothing will happen.” Nancy De Los Santos Reza learned this important lesson early in life. College wasn’t an option, so she got a job as a secretary. A colleague, an older woman who had taken a liking to her, encouraged Nancy to ask her supervisor about attending a professional conference in California. “What’s the worst that could happen?”, the woman asked. “They say ‘no’ and you don’t go? You’re already not going.” As a result, Nancy found herself in San Francisco on a life-changing trip. She would go on to earn two college degrees and become the producer of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s movie review program, At the Movies.
March 2013 | Ink
By Sabrina Vourvoulias
Pub: Crossed Genres
Pub Date: October 2012
ISBN: 9780615657813
$13.95 USD | Paperback
What happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system? The near-future, dark speculative novel Ink opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history—collectively known as inks.
Set in a fictional city and small, rural town in the U.S. during a 10-year span, the novel is told in four voices: a journalist; an ink who works in a local population control office; an artist strongly tied to a specific piece of land; and a teenager whose mother runs an inkatorium (a sanitarium-internment center opened in response to public health concerns about inks).
The main characters grapple with ever-changing definitions of power, home and community; relationships that expand and complicate their lives; personal magicks they don t fully understand; and perceptions of otherness based on ethnicity, language, class and inclusion. In this world, the protagonists magicks serve and fail, as do all other systems—government, gang, religious organization—until only two things alone stand: love and memory.
