First published 2015
Caridad sits surrounded by books in her Los Angeles home, searching for answers about love that her family cannot provide. Her long-suffering mother offers one model of womanhood, her caustic sister Felicia another, and her sentimental sister Esperanza yet another. Caridad rejects them all. Instead, she turns to Chekhov, Flaubert, Dreiser, Lawrence, Nabokov, and Hardy for guidance. As she moves through relationships from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Caridad uses each lover's resources to educate and improve herself. The classic authors inspire her longing while also giving her strength to leave unsatisfying and disastrous relationships behind. She compares herself to a trapeze artist high in a striped tent, leaping from man to man, expecting to be caught until she is ready to jump again. But as she flies through the air, a question haunts her: is she soaring or plummeting?
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, adult-fiction
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Los Angeles
Period: 1970s, 1980s
272 pages · Kindle Edition · University of Arizona Press