Las Madres A novel

From the award-winning, best-selling author of When I Was Puerto Rican, a powerful novel of family, race, faith, sex, and disaster that moves between Puerto Rico and The Bronx, revealing the lives and loves of five women and the secret that binds them together.

Las Madres and their daughters create a family based on friendship and blood ties. Their relationship begins in Puerto Rico, in 1975. Fifteen-year-old Luz, an accomplished dancer, the tallest girl in her academy, and the only Black one in a sea of petite, light-skinned, delicate swans is seriously injured in a car accident. Her brilliant, multilingual scientist parents are killed. Ada and Shirley enter her life when the orphaned Luz most needs a compassionate presence as she navigates adolescence and the aftershocks of a brain injury. Her days are consumed with aches and pains, her memory of the accident has been wiped clean. Spells send her mind to times and places she can’t share with others. 

In 2017, in the Bronx, her adult daughter, Marysol, wishes to understand Luz better. But how can she when her mother barely remembers her own life? Ada and Shirley’s daughter, Graciela, suggests a vacation in Puerto Rico where long-buried memories for Luz might be unearthed and where Marysol might learn more about her mother’s early life. Las Madres and their daughters (las nenas) plan and scheme, but their homecoming brings shocking devastation: two hurricanes, back-to-back, and a secret that blows their lives wide open. In a voice that sings with warmth, humor, friendship, and pride, celebrated author Esmeralda Santiago unspools a story of women’s sexuality, shame, disability, and love within a community rocked by disaster.

ESMERALDA SANTIAGO is the author of the novel Conquistadora and the memoirs When I was Puerto Rican and Almost A Woman, which was adapted into a Peabody Award-winning movie for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she lives with her husband, documentary filmmaker Frank Cantor in New York, and Port Clyde, Maine.