At thirty-something, sharing an apartment with her mother, Paula, is not Flores’ idea of adulthood, freedom or independence. But now that Paula is a widow, Flores must find a way to help her mother cope with the loss of her husband and move on. At the same time, Flores has to deal with her own grief at losing her father, while trying to launch her life and career.
Mother and daughter attempt to support each other and get along, but their choices and understanding of life often clash. Paula wants her daughter to find a nice young man, marry and settle down. Flores wishes her mother would admit when she’s wrong and apologize. She would also prefer to see her mother choose best friends that aren’t always married men.
And she’s never sure if her latest headache is induced by her mother.
When a situation arises that they have to move out of their current apartment, the two women must decide if they should each go their separate ways, or if they can find a way to live together and create a mutual future with new hopes and dreams.
Flores is every child that values the sacrifices of their immigrant parents to create a better life for them. But she also longs to forge her own new path. The challenge is how to go forward without losing the past that she still values and which holds part of her identity.
Paula is every mother who wants a happy and better life for her daughter, but is unskilled at navigating the minefield of when to hang on and when to let go. And as an immigrant, and a widow, she must find the resources within herself to start a new life; whatever that may look like.
Both women struggle to make past and present converge into something new without losing the essential essence of who they are, and where they came from, while they explore their future destinations. The question is, Can they grow together? Or will they grow apart?
A story of loss, forgiveness, and love, Flores and Miss Paula, is a down-to-earth novel of learning what it means to be family, building a new life in a new country, and the tender yet sometimes frustrating relationship between a mother and a daughter.
Veronica Jorge is Latinx in Publishing's Writers Mentorship Program 2024 Adult Fiction Mentee. Melissa Rivero is her Adult Fiction Mentor.
Manager, Educator, and former High School Social Studies teacher, Veronica Jorge credits her love of history to the potpourri of cultures that make up her own life and to her upbringing in diverse Brooklyn, New York. Her work is often based on a search into her ethnic roots that explore identity, belonging, and self-discovery. Her genres of choice are historical fiction, where she always makes new discoveries, literary works because she loves beautiful writing, and children’s picture books because there are so many wonderful worlds yet to be imagined and visited. She currently resides in Macungie, PA.
