A LITTLE LOVE

A treatise on love and culture, set against the backdrop of the new, hip Miami, explores the lives of four Latinas.

Alternating chapters reveal the four friends, mostly in English and occasionally in Spanish, constantly struggling for happiness in a world of conflicting demands. Isabel, marking four years of celibacy since divorcing her Anglo husband, has retreated into work and raising her two teenaged boys. Her younger cousin Mercy, on the other hand, seems bent on exhausting the Miami market for eligible Cuban men. Meanwhile, their elegant friend Lucinda finds herself suffocating in the mansion and the rigid social life purchased by her husband's Dominican family; and Julia, a successful writer and academic, wavers as to whether she should continue a relationship with her near-perfect boyfriend. Slowly the individual stories proceed, the friends talk about each other and occasionally get together for heart-to-heart conversations regarding the latest development, or just life in general. Fate deals Lucinda the hardest blow when she finds her once loving husband has become an adulterer. She leaves him, but the ties of la familia are harder to break; Lucinda discovers that neither she nor her husband actually owns anything. At the same time, her three friends find love in the making: Isabel is being wooed against all odds (though she resists her unexpected good fortune); Mercy, after finally giving up the husband-hunt to build herself a real-estate empire, then meets her Romeo; and Julia falls in love with a woman—and passion, and life. Though there’s plenty of plot, first-novelist Medina focuses on examining relationships as she offers a homey study of four women simultaneously battling and embracing their culture.

Solid, well-honed entertainment.