If I Bring You Roses

Felicidad works behind the counter in her aunt's island bakery, serving the town's busybodies, and dreaming of the family she hasn't seen in nearly a decade, especially of the mother who took to the roof of their home in the mountains in a frenzy of grief and madness. The day Anibal enters the bakery in search of a wife is the day Felicidad dares to believe that the new life she's been imagining could become a reality. Soon the two are married and Felicidad is keeping house in Anibal's Chicago apartment, lavishing care on her husband. But Felicidad's virtue begins to sap Anibal's strength, and chafing at the restraints of marriage and the humiliations of his job in a factory, he takes up with a woman who is everything Felicidad is not: independent, reckless, promiscuous, demanding. As her husband becomes increasingly distant, Felicidad retreats to the dream life that had sustained her back home. Finally reaching a breaking point, Felicidad decides that the moment has come to be reborn in America. How she finds her voice--and Anibal learns to hear her--is at the heart of this passionate novel.

Marisel Vera lives near Chicago, Illinois with her husband and children. Two of her short stories won the Willow Review literary magazine's fiction prize in 2000 and 2003.