Now We Will Be Happy
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Now We Will Be Happy is a prize-winning collection of stories about Afro-Puerto Ricans, U.S.-mainland-born Puerto Ricans, and displaced native Puerto Ricans who are living between spaces while attempting to navigate the unique culture that defines Puerto Rican identity. Amina Gautier’s characters deal with the difficulties of bicultural identities in a world that wants them to choose only one.
The characters in Now We Will Be Happy are as unpredictable as they are human. A teenage boy leaves home in search of the mother he hasn’t seen since childhood; a granddaughter is sent across the ocean to broker peace between her relatives; a widow seeks to die by hurricane; a married woman takes a bathtub voyage with her lover; a proprietress who is the glue that binds her neighborhood cannot hold on to her own son; a displaced wife develops a strange addiction to candles.
Crossing boundaries of comfort, culture, language, race, and tradition in unexpected ways, these characters struggle valiantly and doggedly to reconcile their fantasies of happiness with the realities of their existence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 11 linked stories in Gautier's debut collection, which won the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, vividly evoke Puerto Rico's intoxicating, comforting atmosphere that unbreakable tether binding struggling people in crowded Northeastern U.S. cities to their tropical homeland. "Bodega," "Only Son," and "Palabras" feature a couple in search of a better life who move to Brooklyn and run a corner deli, only to have their only son return to his birthplace. "Now We Will Be Happy" and "Mu eca," meanwhile, depict the abusive marriage of the couple who live next door. Other tales, such as "Aguanile" and "How to Make Flan," consider multigenerational rifts such as that between a woman and her grandfather, whose only communication with her consists of calling to tell her when one of his favorite musicians Charlie Palmieri or H ctor Lavoe has died. Throughout, food and music function as valuable if fragile bridges between otherwise disconnected people. Gautier captures the unique experience, and predicament, of Puerto Ricans living in the mainland U.S.
