This month the #ModernLatinaBookClub will read The Cost of Our Lives
Linda will be among the featured authors at the upcoming third Latinas & Libros event. In collaboration with the SJSU Chicanx/Latinx Student Success Center, we are excited to bring together local Latina authors, students, and the community on Tuesday, March 17, 2020, at San Jose State University. Join us for an evening to celebrate contributions of Latinas in literature and our Latino heritage. This complimentary event will feature Latina authors sharing their inspirational stories, book signing, Mexican hot chocolate, and pan dulce. Click here to learn more and register for the event.
Synopsis:
When Linda González is sixteen, her father’s son from México appears at the front door of her Southern California home. Before that moment, neither Linda nor her siblings knew their father had another child.
Linda’s family portrait slowly shatters over the next years as she discovers her father had a wife and she had two sisters as well. She realizes her very existence is because her father abandoned his first family. With startling candor, Linda relates her parents’ separate journeys to Los Angeles and the life they created in the white suburbs.
Additional family secrets unfold amid Linda’s attempts to silence the echoes of her cultural losses with political work and a lesbian identity. Her memoir is a powerful examination of how childhood identities can endure into adulthood, along with suffering that lingers decades after events have passed.
González’ fluid language, a smooth blend of English and Spanish, reveals a sweeping journey over several decades. Secrets are unveiled and relationships forged and dissolved, often through painful and illuminating encounters with family on both sides of the Rio Grande.
A beautiful, poignant story of families uniting across physical and emotional borders.
Book Club Reflection Questions:
- Who do you think has the most to lose with the secrets coming to light?
- Is there anything similar in your family’s migration story to that of my parents?
- What do you think motivated Miguel and Rosita to look for their father?
- What makes it hard for family members to confront the truth of two families even when older and more mature?
- What is the cost of denial?
- What do you think made Isabel fall into such a deep depression?
- How does Linda try to undo unhealthy patterns in her family?
- How do you relate to dictums on page 126?
- Lies are what the story uncovers, yet how does intentional lying become part of the coping process?
- How does loss open up possibilities for healing?