All For The Better: A Story Of El Barrio

Some people live to make a difference. However they find the world around them, they try to make it better. For them, nothing is so perfect it can’t be improved, and no problem is so difficult it can’t be faced. This is the story of a young girl who in a small way made a difference to many people in her community. She had no special gift beyond caring, but you will see how, much you can do when you care enough to make a difference.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume VI, Issue 4

Romance De El Conde Olinos

This story is about two individuals that cared for each other. It starts with “El Conde Olinos” singing to his horse while he gives him water, on the shores of the sea. The queen hears him and encourages her daughter to listen to the song. The girl innocently reveals the name of the singer, uncovering some loves that are not to the taste of the mother who announces, “ I will send him to kill”. Their threats are fulfilled, and the two lovers die. But the lovers become two birds that will fly together.

In the Shade of the Nispero Tree

When her mother wants her to be part of the high society world in their native Puerto Rico, Teresa attends a private school but loses her best friend. All Teresa and her best friend and classmate Ana think about is winning the contest for the Junior Queen and Princess of their town in Ponce, Puerto Rico. But Tere’s mother has different ideas for her only daughter. She wants her to be part of La Sociedad, “high society,” and go to a fancy private school. At first Tere doesn’t want to leave her school friends to follow her mother’s dream. She knows her parents can’t afford the luxuries the rich girls take for granted. But when Tere gets into trouble and has a fight with Ana, she quickly changes her mind. Now she finds herself caught between two worlds.

When I Was Puerto Rican

Esmeralda Santiago’s story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby’s soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity.