Description
A Woman’s Story
by Francine Rodriguez
978-1-956440-22-5 hard cover 26.95
978-1-948692-60-1 paper 19.95
978-1-948692-61-8 ebook 9.99
5½ x 8½, 244 pp.
fiction
August 2021
Best Collection of Short Stories – English
SILVER MEDAL
Insights from the ILBA judges about A Woman’s Story:
“These stories depict Latinas and the often-traumatizing situations they face.”
Empowering Latino Futures – International Latino Book Awards
The Largest Awards in the USA Celebrating Achievements in Latino Literature
The International Latino Book Awards reflects that 2021 is a major turning point for books by & about Latinos. The International Latino Book Awards is a reflection that the fastest growing group in the USA has truly arrived. The awards are now by far the largest Latino cultural Awards in the USA.
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A Woman’s Story tells the stories of Latina women’s lives. Depicting conflict in gender bias, experiences of exploitation, violence, and powerlessness, sometimes resulting in pain and despair in their turbulent world. But these stories also tell of these women’s celebration of life itself that empowers them and gives them the will to sustain. These stories resonate on a deeply emotional level.
Francine Rodriguez grew up in and around downtown Los Angeles and later worked as a Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Investigator in the Federal sector. All told, she has worked in the fields of law and psychology for over thirty years, and her experiences in these fields inform her writing. She has published two previous novels, A Fortunate Accident (Booklocker 2015), and A Woman Like Me (Booklocker 2019). Her website is FrancineRodriguezAuthor.com
“Finding my Father” does not appear in A Woman’s Story, but it is set in the same time and place, and carries the same authorial voice. It works as a great introduction to the world Francine writes about.
PRAISE FOR STORIES FROM A WOMAN’S STORY
“Smiley and the Laughing Girl” By Francine Rodriguez WHY WE LIKE IT: We love Rodriguez’s honest, down to earth, totally unaffected style and her deep investment in her characters. The story falls under the classification of ‘dirty realism’ (with a feminist slant) but in the end it resists any kind of definition. All we can call it is ‘good writing’. —Fleas On The Dog, Vol 7
Wow! Once again author Francine Rodriguez proves that she is the eyes and ears of Latina Realism. Her series of short stories in A Woman’s Story draws on her inner-city life experiences, revealing extraordinarily provocative vignettes of love, sex, violence, and injustice. Francine’s vivid descriptions of the lives of women as heroines and as victims stir all one’s emotions. My soul is aroused by her captivating imagination portrayed in the half-fiction, half real-life personalities. ¡Bien hecho! —Rocky Barilla, International Society of Latino Authors, author of Esmerelda
Through a brutally honest approach, Rodriguez’s words guide you on a timely and unfiltered expedition of the contemporary social landscapes Latinx women traverse in the U.S. in the early 2000s. Her writings explore the delicate and very real balancing act they must display being the human at the center of frenzied collisions in culture, community, socio-economics, sexuality, and gender. Often gentle, and painful, the intensity of her stories shine through with the same intensity with which Latinx women must face society in today’s America. —Nikolas Gonzales, World History Adj. Professor, World History Department- Bunker Hill Community College, and author of Moraga Deconstructed: Illuminations in Mexican-American Heritage
In a unique and unlikely feminist reclaiming of dirty realism, Francine Rodriguez’s A Woman’s Story takes us on an intimate yet dystopian journey into the effects and innerworkings of identity-based marginalization. … These silenced memories give us insight into many other Herstories and truths that may never be known not only because they were once forbidden, but because they are still mostly inaccessible to a mass U.S. American audience. —Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Ph.D., Associate Professor – Decolonial Media Studies Department of Communication Studies, CSU San Bernardino
kpdavis –
This is the publisher speaking, admittedly, but I love this book. I met Francine when she hired me to redesign her website to accommodate her two previous books. She asked me to read a few of her short stories when she found out about my publishing business, and I was blown away. This is not the way books usually come to us! Francine has a gift for placing the reader in the place she’s writing about, and place figures prominently in all her work. She really knows these people, knows this world. Yes, it is sometimes bleak, often bleak, but it’s honest. I think this is Urban Fiction at its finest.