Cherries in Winter

September 14, 2009
As the economy tanked throughout 2008, magazine editor Colón began strategizing and was better prepared when she lost her job. At her mother's suggestion, she unearthed her grandmother's recipe file, and with it a greater sensitivity about a family history that spanned the hardest years of the 20th century. The resulting book is half cooking memoir with recipes, some more practical than others, and partly family chronicle, some personalities more resilient and dimensional than others. The menfolk, including the narrator's husband and her forebears are mostly given their due (though the disappearance of Colón's biological father is elided), but the story reads as a substantial homage to a strong matriarchal line, from the author's own determined persona and voice to the prominent and similar roles played by her mother and her maternal grandmother. The narrative has ample Working Girl
spunk and shifts deftly if quickly among stories and decades and geographies.