Don't Date Rosa Santos: Review
"Viva Cuba Libre." - Don't Date Rosa Santos by Nina Moreno
Have you ever read a book that feels so much like home, like childhood, that you forget that you never actually had any of those experiences? Well, that's what reading Don't Date Rosa Santos by Nina Moreno is like.
Okay, let me back up a little. Now, I'm not going to pretend that I'm part of the Cuban-American or Latinx culture for the sake of connecting to this book, because obviously that's wrong and racist and people actually do that? But I will tell you that I grew up in Southern California, and I was, quite literally, the token white friend of my close-knit group. It was kind of funny, to be honest. So I grew up around a lot of diverse families, and I loved it. It was the best part of my childhood. It felt like I had twelve different families. My best friend, Cheyenne, is Arabic, and her family is huge. Like, intimidatingly huge. But I remember birthday parties and summer barbecues with her family so vividly, that they feel like my family too.
So, when I say that reading this book felt like home to me, that is what I meant. The town of Port Coral, Florida, is so close-knit and tied together that it's like they're all family. That's what growing up in my hometown felt like.
But I'm not going to erase the Cuban culture that this book is woven in to. The Cuban culture is what makes this book up, truly! I absolutely loved reading about all the ways that Rosa is connected to Cuba, even though she had never been there before, and felt like she had no real connection to the country at all. Reading from an outsider's point of view it was easy to pick up on all of the ways that Cuba made up Port Coral. From the food that they ate to the music they listened to, everything about Don't Date Rosa Santos was ingrained in the tiny island south of Florida. Which, of course, we have the author to thank for. Nina Moreno is Cuban and Colombian-American, and you can really tell she poured her whole heart and soul into writing this story. Also she's super sweet and has a Georgian accent, in case you wanted to know.
Okay, let's talk about Don't Date Rosa Santos, shall we?
This book follows seventeen-year-old Rosa Santos in her final year of high school. Faced with a grueling decision of where she will attend college, she tries to navigate the relationship between her steady grandmother (affectionately called Mimi, both by her and the rest of Port Coral) and her wild-at-heart mother. Throughout her entire life she has been told that the Santos women are cursed by the sea, the same ocean that claimed both her grandfather's and her father's lives. But more than anything, Rosa wants to see Cuba, the country her grandmother and grandfather fled from in the wake of the civil war.
*WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. SPOILERS START HERE. DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU HAVE NOT READ DON'T DATE ROSA SANTOS*
There is a lot I want to unpack in this book, so I'm just going to dive right in.
Let's start with the Spring Fest, the plot point that kicks off the entire book. I recall similar festivals in both my hometown and where I live now, where people of a city or town come together and just celebrate who they are. They're always magical to behold, so when I read that there was going to be said festival in this book, I got super excited. And, the Spring Fest brought together the romance of the book; Rosa Santos and Alejandro (Alex) Aquino. Gah, they're so cute! This romance was honestly so pure, the kind of goofy first-love everyone dreams of having in high school. Really though, can I have an Alex Aquino? An aloof, tattooed college-drop out that seems super broody and a little scary, but is actually the purest cinnamon roll who bakes and dreams of sailing around the world? Yes, please!
The only thing that I didn't completely love about the Spring Fest was the wedding. I did like the idea of the wedding, truly, but I just felt that the plot kind of got lost in the rest of the book, and then it just shows up again at the end when the Spring Fest is happening and suddenly they're getting married. I feel like I would've appreciated it a lot more if we got more of the wedding planning planted throughout the book. Especially since it's the wedding planning that drove Rosa and Alex together in the first place. Once Rosa figured out that the reason Alex took on the responsibility of the wedding cake was because he was going to bake it, the planning kind of died off a bit. And I know from experience that planning a wedding takes forever, no matter how small or how extravagant it is.
Another subplot I was kind of iffy about was the Golden Turtle. Like, I get the significance of it, how Liliana and Rosa's father were the ones to hide it all those years ago, and Rosa and her friends were the ones to rediscover it. It makes me wonder if this kind of tradition was something that Moreno had at her high school, because how does one come up with something so random? I feel like it had to have been rooted in reality. But again, like the wedding, the inclusion of the Golden Turtle felt really sporadic to me. But I didn't dislike it. I'm just not sure if I loved it, you know?
Let's talk about something I did love: the portrayal of grief and loss. Not going to lie here, when Mimi died I was sobbing. I haven't cried this much at a book since I read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and I read that when I was fifteen. A full six years has passed since a book has made me this emotional. Just let that sink in for a moment.
I am no stranger to grief and loss. It's something that has plagued my family and friends for about as long as I can remember. Of course, I'm pretty sure everyone can say that. Everyone dies eventually, it's just a matter of who and when and the circumstances behind it. But the sudden death that Mimi has, that Rosa and Liliana and the rest of Port Coral have to experience, it's completely different than someone going slow. It makes your entire world tilt on its axis, like you're being thrown out of equilibrium. And Moreno managed to write that so eloquently. That kind of loss shakes you to your core. So the heart-wrenching sobs that Rosa is overcome with at random parts of the day, it feels so realistic. I remember when one of my best friends passed away when we were thirteen, there would be full days where I would be completely fine, and then I'd see something that reminded me of her, and I would dissolve into a puddle of tears in the middle of the sidewalk.
I never did get closure for my friend's death. But Rosa got closure for Mimi's. The entire Cuba trip with her mom kind of felt like a dream, even more so when they met Tia Nela and she led them on this wild adventure across the island. But it felt right. The entire book had snippets of Rosa's brujeria and it was so incredible, seeing magic and witchcraft portrayed like that, so accurately. That was something that really drew me to this book in the first place; someone mentioned that Rosa and Mimi did a little herbalist and ancestral magic, and that it was true witchcraft, and I was there. I'm pretty sure Tia Nela sent Rosa and Liliana on to some sort of trip that night they went into the Caribbean Sea, but the realness mixed with the mystical felt good. Not to mention Rosa's tiny alter in her room for her Papi and her father. I know from both reading on Latinx culture, and again from experience, that ancestral alters are extremely important, so Rosa's alter was just another thing that really rooted both her and the book to their roots.
Okay, I think I'm done rambling. If it wasn't clear already, Don't Date Rosa Santos by Nina Moreno was a five star read for me. 2019 is really coming through with the incredible publications! I'm looking forward to reading more of Moreno's work in the future, and I hope that they all have the same sense of home that Rosa Santos did.
Have you ever read a book that feels so much like home, like childhood, that you forget that you never actually had any of those experiences? Well, that's what reading Don't Date Rosa Santos by Nina Moreno is like.
Okay, let me back up a little. Now, I'm not going to pretend that I'm part of the Cuban-American or Latinx culture for the sake of connecting to this book, because obviously that's wrong and racist and people actually do that? But I will tell you that I grew up in Southern California, and I was, quite literally, the token white friend of my close-knit group. It was kind of funny, to be honest. So I grew up around a lot of diverse families, and I loved it. It was the best part of my childhood. It felt like I had twelve different families. My best friend, Cheyenne, is Arabic, and her family is huge. Like, intimidatingly huge. But I remember birthday parties and summer barbecues with her family so vividly, that they feel like my family too.
So, when I say that reading this book felt like home to me, that is what I meant. The town of Port Coral, Florida, is so close-knit and tied together that it's like they're all family. That's what growing up in my hometown felt like.
But I'm not going to erase the Cuban culture that this book is woven in to. The Cuban culture is what makes this book up, truly! I absolutely loved reading about all the ways that Rosa is connected to Cuba, even though she had never been there before, and felt like she had no real connection to the country at all. Reading from an outsider's point of view it was easy to pick up on all of the ways that Cuba made up Port Coral. From the food that they ate to the music they listened to, everything about Don't Date Rosa Santos was ingrained in the tiny island south of Florida. Which, of course, we have the author to thank for. Nina Moreno is Cuban and Colombian-American, and you can really tell she poured her whole heart and soul into writing this story. Also she's super sweet and has a Georgian accent, in case you wanted to know.
Okay, let's talk about Don't Date Rosa Santos, shall we?
This book follows seventeen-year-old Rosa Santos in her final year of high school. Faced with a grueling decision of where she will attend college, she tries to navigate the relationship between her steady grandmother (affectionately called Mimi, both by her and the rest of Port Coral) and her wild-at-heart mother. Throughout her entire life she has been told that the Santos women are cursed by the sea, the same ocean that claimed both her grandfather's and her father's lives. But more than anything, Rosa wants to see Cuba, the country her grandmother and grandfather fled from in the wake of the civil war.
*WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. SPOILERS START HERE. DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU HAVE NOT READ DON'T DATE ROSA SANTOS*
There is a lot I want to unpack in this book, so I'm just going to dive right in.
Let's start with the Spring Fest, the plot point that kicks off the entire book. I recall similar festivals in both my hometown and where I live now, where people of a city or town come together and just celebrate who they are. They're always magical to behold, so when I read that there was going to be said festival in this book, I got super excited. And, the Spring Fest brought together the romance of the book; Rosa Santos and Alejandro (Alex) Aquino. Gah, they're so cute! This romance was honestly so pure, the kind of goofy first-love everyone dreams of having in high school. Really though, can I have an Alex Aquino? An aloof, tattooed college-drop out that seems super broody and a little scary, but is actually the purest cinnamon roll who bakes and dreams of sailing around the world? Yes, please!
The only thing that I didn't completely love about the Spring Fest was the wedding. I did like the idea of the wedding, truly, but I just felt that the plot kind of got lost in the rest of the book, and then it just shows up again at the end when the Spring Fest is happening and suddenly they're getting married. I feel like I would've appreciated it a lot more if we got more of the wedding planning planted throughout the book. Especially since it's the wedding planning that drove Rosa and Alex together in the first place. Once Rosa figured out that the reason Alex took on the responsibility of the wedding cake was because he was going to bake it, the planning kind of died off a bit. And I know from experience that planning a wedding takes forever, no matter how small or how extravagant it is.
Another subplot I was kind of iffy about was the Golden Turtle. Like, I get the significance of it, how Liliana and Rosa's father were the ones to hide it all those years ago, and Rosa and her friends were the ones to rediscover it. It makes me wonder if this kind of tradition was something that Moreno had at her high school, because how does one come up with something so random? I feel like it had to have been rooted in reality. But again, like the wedding, the inclusion of the Golden Turtle felt really sporadic to me. But I didn't dislike it. I'm just not sure if I loved it, you know?
Let's talk about something I did love: the portrayal of grief and loss. Not going to lie here, when Mimi died I was sobbing. I haven't cried this much at a book since I read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and I read that when I was fifteen. A full six years has passed since a book has made me this emotional. Just let that sink in for a moment.
I am no stranger to grief and loss. It's something that has plagued my family and friends for about as long as I can remember. Of course, I'm pretty sure everyone can say that. Everyone dies eventually, it's just a matter of who and when and the circumstances behind it. But the sudden death that Mimi has, that Rosa and Liliana and the rest of Port Coral have to experience, it's completely different than someone going slow. It makes your entire world tilt on its axis, like you're being thrown out of equilibrium. And Moreno managed to write that so eloquently. That kind of loss shakes you to your core. So the heart-wrenching sobs that Rosa is overcome with at random parts of the day, it feels so realistic. I remember when one of my best friends passed away when we were thirteen, there would be full days where I would be completely fine, and then I'd see something that reminded me of her, and I would dissolve into a puddle of tears in the middle of the sidewalk.
I never did get closure for my friend's death. But Rosa got closure for Mimi's. The entire Cuba trip with her mom kind of felt like a dream, even more so when they met Tia Nela and she led them on this wild adventure across the island. But it felt right. The entire book had snippets of Rosa's brujeria and it was so incredible, seeing magic and witchcraft portrayed like that, so accurately. That was something that really drew me to this book in the first place; someone mentioned that Rosa and Mimi did a little herbalist and ancestral magic, and that it was true witchcraft, and I was there. I'm pretty sure Tia Nela sent Rosa and Liliana on to some sort of trip that night they went into the Caribbean Sea, but the realness mixed with the mystical felt good. Not to mention Rosa's tiny alter in her room for her Papi and her father. I know from both reading on Latinx culture, and again from experience, that ancestral alters are extremely important, so Rosa's alter was just another thing that really rooted both her and the book to their roots.
Okay, I think I'm done rambling. If it wasn't clear already, Don't Date Rosa Santos by Nina Moreno was a five star read for me. 2019 is really coming through with the incredible publications! I'm looking forward to reading more of Moreno's work in the future, and I hope that they all have the same sense of home that Rosa Santos did.
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