The House on the Lagoon
by Rosario Ferré
A Puerto Rican family saga and the woman writing it down.
For you if
you want to understand Puerto Rico's political history through the people who lived inside it across a century
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Isabel is writing the history of her husband's family across five generations in Puerto Rico — from the Spanish colonial period through American occupation to the present. Her husband keeps trying to take the manuscript away. Ferré uses the struggle over who gets to tell the story as the story itself — the battle between the nationalist and the assimilationist, between the woman's version and the man's, between independence and statehood. The most architecturally ambitious Puerto Rican novel ever written in English. A dispatch about whose version of history gets to survive.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Puerto Rico • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Puerto Rican author
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
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A family, a country, a century of ghosts.
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Caramelo
Sandra Cisneros
Every summer to Mexico. They always bring the past.
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The Promise
Damon Galgut
They promised. They keep almost keeping the promise.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
