Full name: When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir

Author: Esmeralda Santiago Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Memoirs, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780306814525 0306814528

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. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard. Similar books: Almost a Woman by Esmeralda Santiago My Mother Was Nuts by Penny Marshall Let Me Finish by Roger Angell Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas What Remains by Carole Radziwill The Death of Santini by Pat Conroy Elsewhere by Richard Russo Extreme by Sharon Osbourne The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende In Pieces by Sally Field Myself When Young by Daphne Du Maurier Blackbird by Jennifer Lauck Still Waters by Jennifer Lauck Then Again by Diane Keaton The Turkish Lover by Esmeralda Santiago Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand How Not to Die by Michael Greger The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel A. van der Kolk The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls