Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution
In a voice haunting and filled with longing, Before the Rain tells the story of love unexpected, its fragile bounds and subtle perils. As a newspaper editor in the ’80s, Luisita Torregrosa lived her career. Enter Elizabeth, a striking, reserved, and elusive writer with whom Torregrosa falls...
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In a voice haunting and filled with longing, Before the Rain tells the story of love unexpected, its fragile bounds and subtle perils. As a newspaper editor in the ’80s, Luisita Torregrosa lived her career. Enter Elizabeth, a striking, reserved, and elusive writer with whom Torregrosa falls deeply in love. Their story—irresistible romance, overlapping ambitions, and fragile union—unfolds as the narrative shifts to the Philippines and the fall of Ferdinand Marcos. There, on that beautiful, troubled island, the couple creates a world of their own, while covering political chaos and bloody upheavals. What was effortless abroad becomes less idyllic when they return to the United States, and their ending becomes as surprising and revealing as their beginning. Torregrosa captures the way love transforms those who experience it for an unforgettable, but often too brief, time. This book is distinguished not only by its strong, unique, and conflicted heroines, but also by Torregrosa’s lyrical portrait of the Philippines and the even more exotic heart of intimacy.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780547669205 (0547669208)
Publish date: August 7th 2012
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages no: 240
Edition language: English
2.5 stars. I think this book would have gotten in a higher rating if I had been more in the mood for what it was, which is basically about being a journalist. I saw it at the library and read the first page or two--really really gorgeous writing--and decided to go ahead and check it out (even though...
This is a memoir that reads like a novel, and that's both a good and bad thing. Torregrosa has a sinuous, vague, slippery style of writing that I love in a good novel (I was reminded a bit of early '90s Jeannette Winterson) but feels a bit incomplete in a memoir. This story of 'love and revolution...