A young girl living in an Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago ponders the advantages and disadvantages of her environment and evaluates her relationships with family and friends.

Lala Reyes' grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo-, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala's possession. The novel opens with the Reyes' annual car trip-a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels-from Chicago to "the other side": Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family's...

A girl describes how each person in the family has hair that looks and acts different, Papa's like a broom, Kiki's like fur, and Mama's with the sweet smell of bread before it's baked.

"The word "orphan" might not seem to apply to a fifty-three-year-old woman. Yet this is exactly how Sandra feels as she finds herself motherless, alone like "a glove left behind at the bus station." What just might save her is her search for someone else gone missing: Marie, the black-and-white cat of her friend, Roz, who ran off the day they arrived from Tacoma. As Sandra and Roz scour the streets of San Antonio, posting flyers and asking everywhere,...

Evoking her own Latina experience, an introduction to the work of the acclaimed author features excerpts from The House on Mango Street and Caramelo, poetry from My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman, and short fiction from Woman Hollering Creek.

When she unearths a letter in a closet, Corina finds the memories of her days spent in Paris rushing back as she remembers her intense friendships with two women with whom she fell out of touch and out of mind.