Don't Date Rosa Santos

Don't Date Rosa Santos

YA fiction
Soup simmered, wind chimes sang softly, and candles lit the way
back to my room. I was home, and talking about Cuba had no place
here. Mimi was never returning. My mother was always leaving, and I
was a flightless bird left at her harbor, searching for answers that
were buried at the bottom of a sea that I could not know."
Rosa, protagonist of Nina Moreno's Don't Date Rosa Santos, is in
a world of confusion. She had chosen a college with a one semester
study abroad program in Cuba. But just as she had been working on how
to tell the expatriate grandmother she lives with, a woman who doesn't
want to discuss her native island, the program is cancelled. Now she
has no idea which of the colleges she's been accepted to she wants to
attend or whether she still wants to major in Latin studies.
Deadlines are approaching fast.
Rosa's family presents challenges. Her father died before she
was born. Her artist mother travels most of the time, dropping in
randomly and leaving just as unpredictably. She and her mother don't
get along, making a challenging millieu for Rosa to navigate.
And then there's the family curse. Rosa's grandfather drowned
smuggling his pregnant wife to America. Her father's boat went down
in a storm when her mother was pregnant. In Rosa's small community it
is believed that a boy with a boat who falls for a Santos woman is
doomed...
...which could be bad news because Rosa is falling for Alex.
Alex has a boat...
...and you'll have to read the book to see how that plays out.
On a purrrsonal note, did you ever have something you set your heart
on and worked to make happen become impossible? That happened to me
on Tuesday. Recall I was set to do a poster presentation on a unique
arrangement UMaine dining has with Black Bear Exchange at an
international conference in Kentucky? I was looking forward to flying
to Kentucky with friends, staying in a hotel, meeting other people in
higher education who share my passion, learning ideas to take back to
UMaine, bringing credit to my beloved school, and maybe inspiring
other schools to follow our example. Well it turns out that there is
a policy forbidding student plane travel. So Kentucky fell through.
I think I learned at the worst possible time, namely hours before...
...you can learn what in my next purrrsonal note.
A great big shout out goes out to my friends who are totally
understanding how frustrated I am.
jules hathaway


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