5.0 out of 5 starsI'm Ready To Move to Hernando Villa!
By D.A. Wintsmith on May 29, 2016

I came to HERNANDO VILLA with no knowledge of Sri Lanka, Tamils, Sinhalese, or anything about their culture and history. I also came with an embarrassing tendency to confuse the name Sri Lanka with Shangri-La. So you can see the level of my complete ignorance. Still, HERNANDO VILLA was easily accessible to me as a reader.

The charming contemporary couple who own the Villa and their best friends seemed familiar to me, and I realized that I knew their counterparts here in the USA. There was a theme of family and couples humor throughout, set against the terrifying backdrop of recent racial violence, terrorist, and nature at her worst. The tendency in western literature is to write about dysfunctional families, and the Hernandos have their share of drama with secrets and meddling aunts and star-crossed lovers, but they go about it with class and style, and most importantly with concern for the human element of situations, which I have witnessed in everyday life but rarely see captured in books.

This is the kind of book one can go back to and live in for a while. The people are that pleasant, and yet not in the least dull. Well, not everyone is pleasant -- there is Aunt Margie who wants to rule the family but she gets her due, really more than her due finally. And there are the awful prospective husbands that the matchmaker keeps presenting to the families with eligible daughters. There is the racial bias that even families who are friends with people of different races and castes must deal with. And there is courage and heroism and tragedy. In short, it is life, captured in an easy read that makes you ponder without pontificating.
https://www.amazon.com/author/terrenc...