Idgie Says:This novel is about three generations of women who all believe they are doing the best they can do, while each thinks the others are not doing as they should. They're all living with regrets, and they all think that they actually know each other when in reality there's many many secrets between all of them.
Maria just wants to be loved and feel as special and wanted as she is sure her mother is - as her mother, she believes, is adored by an entire country. Her mother just wants to reclaim the love of her daughter who feels she was forced to give away to her parents to live in the United because of her dedication to the resistance. Grandmother Isabella just want the family be together again, while perhaps hiding some secrets of her own.
The novel travels back and forth in time between the Nicaraguan conflicts of the past, and the conflicts that remain today.
This novel will appeal to two genres - the women's fiction/emotional growing reader and the historical events reader. It has both.
St. Martin's Press
May 5, 2015
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Book Description:
When Maria Vazquez returns to Nicaragua for her beloved grandfather’s funeral, she brings with her a mysterious package from her grandmother’s past—and a secret of her own. And she also carries the burden of her tense relationship with her mother Ninexin, once a storied revolutionary, now a tireless government employee.
Between Maria and Ninexin lies a chasm created by the death of Maria’s father, who was killed during the revolution when Maria was an infant, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother Isabela as Ninexin worked to build the new Nicaragua. While Ninexin tries to reach her daughter, Maria wrestles with her expectations for her romance with an older man.
In the meantime, Isabela, the mourning widow, is consumed by her memories of attending boarding school in 1950’s New Orleans, where she loved and lost almost sixty years ago. When the three women come together to bid farewell to the man who anchored their family, they are forced to confront their complicated, passionate relationships with each other and with their country—and to reveal the secrets that each of them has worked to conceal.
Lushly evocative of Nicaragua, its tumultuous history, and vibrant present, The Ladies of Managua brings you into the lives of three strong and magnetic women, as they uncover the ramifications of the choices they made in their pasts and begin to understand the ways in which love can shape their futures.