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The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico
Sarah McCoy
Three Rivers Press
August 2010
On Sale: August 3, 2010
Featuring: Verdita Ortiz-Santiago
224 pages
ISBN: 0307460177
EAN: 9780307460172
Trade Size (reprint)
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Contemporary | Young Adult
It is 1961 and Puerto Rico is trapped in a tug-of-war
between those who want to stay connected to the United
States and those who are fighting for independence. For
eleven-year-old Verdita Ortiz-Santiago, the struggle for
independence is a battle fought much closer to
home.
Verdita has always been safe and secure in
her sleepy mountain town, far from the excitement of the
capital city of San Juan or the glittering shores of the
United States, where her older cousin lives. She will be a
señorita soon, which, as her mother reminds her,
means that she will be expected to cook and clean, go to
Mass every day, choose arroz con pollo over
hamburguesas, and give up her love for Elvis. And
yet, as much as Verdita longs to escape this seemingly
inevitable future and become a blond American bombshell, she
is still a young girl who is scared by late-night stories of
the chupacabra, who wishes her mother would still rub
her back and sing her a lullaby, and who is both ashamed and
exhilarated by her changing body.
Told in luminous
prose spanning two years in Verdita’s life, The Time It
Snowed in Puerto Rico is much more than a story about
getting older. In the tradition of The House on Mango
Street and Annie John, it is about the struggle
to break free from the people who have raised us, and about
the difficulties of leaving behind one's homeland for places
unknown. At times joyous and at times heartbreaking,
Verdita’s story is of a young girl discovering her power and
finding the strength to decide what sort of woman she’ll become.
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