The Taste of Sugar

February 3, 2020
Vera (If I Bring You Roses) follows the shifting fortunes of a Puerto Rican family after U.S. occupation in this intense, emotional saga. In 1889, 17-year-old Valentina Sanchez, head full of fantasies of Paris trips and grand romance, marries handsome coffee farmer Vicente Vega despite her family’s objections. She returns with him to his unwelcoming family in Utuado, where the vagaries of the coffee harvest delay their move from the isolated mountains. After three years, they move into a crudely built home, where happy times are overshadowed by the accidental death of their young daughter. When Vicente loses his farm in 1900 due to economic hardships following American occupation, the family leaves for Hawaii to work on sugar plantations. A series of tragedies and indignities ensues—the couple’s son drowns at sea on the way to the islands, and they’re greeted in Hawaii by squalid living conditions—before Vera ends the book on a slightly hopeful, if unresolved note, as the family bonds with other Puerto Rican families in Hawaii. Vera pieces together the epic tale with acute moments of crushing pain and disillusion overcome by the strong characters’ implacable resilience. The novel’s deeply felt mixture of the characters’ sorrow and joy offers a vibrant glimpse of the history of Puerto Ricans in Hawaii. Agent: Betsy Amster, Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises. (Jun.)Correction: The author's last name was misspelled in two instances in an earlier version of this review.

April 15, 2020
A sprawling family epic that stretches from the mountains of Puerto Rico to Hawaii and across decades of love, famine, and war. Valentina S�nchez comes from a middle-class, urban family in late-19th-century Puerto Rico. Her family has modest dreams, but Valentina luxuriates in her fantasies of marrying a handsome man and seeing Paris. When the dashing Vicente Vega, son of a very wealthy (or so Valentina assumes) coffee farmer, sweeps her off her feet at a cousin's wedding, Valentina is determined to go against her family's wishes and marry for love. However, Valentina's marriage to Vicente never takes flight. Between fending off the advances of her lecherous father-in-law and dealing with the starkly unromantic realities of being married to a coffee farmer who's actually quite poor, happiness eludes Valentina. As the novel creeps into the 20th century, Valentina's suffering increases alongside Puerto Rico's. Caught in the crossfire of the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rican farmers experience Spanish tax hikes, drought, American devaluation of the peso, and finally American occupation. Hurricane San Ciriaco kills thousands and washes away not just farms, but Puerto Rico's dreams of self-rule. Eventually, Vicente and Valentina are lured by false promises to Hawaii, another U.S. territory described as paradise but rife with violence and exploitation. Vera tells a grand story using innovative techniques. The chapters tend to be short and are frequently interspersed with letters, detours into the past, and theatrical monologues. The Vega and S�nchez families are made up of vivid, fully realized characters, and Vera has a knack for writing dialogue that is full of personality. Her descriptions of Puerto Rico's natural beauty are impressive: "[Vicente and Valentina] meant only to look up at the stars from the veranda, but the scent of orchids lured them into the garden and soon they were enveloped by coconut palms. Las damas de noches opened their white petals for the moon, and the moon mistook the silver embroidery on Valentina's dress for stars." Where the novel runs ashore is in grappling with historical events. Vega chronicles the exploitation of Puerto Rico by the Spanish and then the Americans, and the reader will emerge with a deep sense of Puerto Rican history and suffering that has been lost to most Americans, but at times the author's devotion to historical details and anecdotes pushes the beautifully wrought characters aside. Vera's breakout novel is a sweeping, emotional tale that puts her characters, and her readers, through an emotional wringer.

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May 1, 2020

In the late 1890s, the devastating San Ciriaco hurricane wrecked the Puerto Rican sugar, cotton, tobacco, and coffee industries just as the island's population was coming to terms with the impact of the Spanish-American War and an American occupying force. Vera (If I Bring Roses) captures the trials of Vicente and Valentina Vega, homing in on their efforts to sustain their struggling coffee farm amid overwhelming personal tragedies and trials. Like thousands of their compatriots, the couple risks immigration to Hawaii, where sugar plantation owners entice desperate families facing starvation with what are ultimately empty promises of an improved livelihood. Along with other laborers from Japan, the Vega family faces discrimination, horrific working conditions, poverty, and homesickness. The narrative is interspersed with letters from Valentina to her sister revealing Puerto Rico's rich, complex history and socioeconomic setting in the 19th century. VERDICT Vera's saga is impeccably timed to provide insights into the troubling history of Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States, and showing that the colonization of puertorrique�os extended to the Pacific fills a gap in history for many. Recommended for anyone who enjoys epic stories of hardship and loss as well as the perseverance, love, and strength drawn from one's family and culture.--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2020
Tapping into her Puerto Rican heritage and conducting plenty of research, Vera (If I Bring You Roses, 2011) presents a heartfelt depiction of once-proud coffee plantation hacendados (owners) in very difficult times. In the years before the Spanish-American War of 1898, Valentina Sanchez is a hopeless romantic from Ponce when she marries Vicente Vega of rural Utuado, a good man who can only offer hard work on the plantation. Buckling down to establish a dignified life while so many other islanders are starving, they grapple with injustice and the invading U.S. military. Presaging recent Puerto Rican tragedies, their fragile family economy is finally destroyed after the devastating 1899 hurricane, San Ciriaco. In their desperation, the Vegas take the extreme measure of following the siren call of sugar-cane-plantation recruiters and migrate to Hawaii, where they face ruthless exploitation. Progressing chronologically, the omniscient narrator seamlessly folds in Spanish words and phrases as well as epistolary interludes between Valentina and her sister, Elena. Vera 's novel is historical fiction at its best, featuring engaging survivors from a forgotten past.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)