Dark Plums

by Maria Espinosa

DARK PLUMS is Maria Espinosa's exploration of a young woman's search for love and self in Manhattan. Set in the late 1950s, Adrianne, a young girl from Texas, wanders the city and has sex indiscriminately with strangers. Her relationship with a Cuban-American artist, Alfredo, leads to further degradation as she agrees to work as a hooker in order to support his work as a painter. His treatment of her becomes increasingly brutal, and her suffering becomes so intense that she breaks down. But she ultimately emerges with the strength to leave him.

221 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

MARIA ESPINOSA is a novelist, poet, and translator as well as a teacher. Her publications include five novels: Incognito: Journey of a Secret Jew, Dark Plums, Longing, which received an American Book Award, as well as Dying Unfinished, which received a Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence from PEN Oakland. Her fifth and most recent novel, Suburban Souls, tells a tale of Jewish German Holocaust survivors in 1970’s San Francisco. She has also published two collections of poems, Love Feelings, and Night Music, and a critically acclaimed translation of George Sand’s novel, Lelia. Espinosa is concerned with human communication on a level that transcends the norms permitted by society. Her novels focus on the subtle as well as the obvious forces that shape a human being.

Reviews

[Sarah Mackowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 rounded to 3. Found this at a used bookstore and it looks like I’m only a handful of people who have read it.