Fifty Books Project 2023

Love War Stories

By Ivelisse Rodriguez

In South Holyoke, the Flats, Up the Hill, and on Chestnut Street, the Puerto Rican girls walk in silence, hoping for invisibility if they are alone or in pairs, but more than two and they feel safe, like they can beat anyone down, like they own the streets.  Trekking home with Casandra after school, Veronica’s heart beats erratically when she spies a group of Puerto Rican girls occupying the stoop ahead of them.  This is when she and Cassandra are wary of their volume; they lower their voices and try not to rouse anyone’s attention.  Cassandra’s reputation only extends so far.  They’re no longer at Holyoke High and they don’t know these girls. It’s always this way with them. Every day the heart pounding.  The only time they can be carelessly loud, throw their shoulders back, and be noticed is around white people.

The stories in this volume present a vivid but ultimately sad portrait of contemporary life for Puerto Rican girls, and by extension, all young women.  While they are varied in setting – the streets of East Harlem, the steps of Columbia Law School, the beaches of Puerto Rico, the collapsed mill towns of New England – and there is variety among the life situations of the characters – their economic prospects and educational motivations especially, there is a clear set of themes relayed by the title.  Actually, the way those three words form a single theme is the real guiding force behind the book.  Some of the girls in the stories are in love, but love is not a peaceful or joyful prospect for them:  it is simply the only prospect.

So in “El Qué Durán,” Lola is being taught that her whole purpose in life is to marry the young man who is her date for her quinceañera, an obviously untrustworthy young lout named Ricardo.  As readers, we are never under the impression that this is a good idea:  she is fifteen, after all.  The power of the story comes from the fact that no one can really think it is a good idea:  the subplot of the story concerns how marrying her quinceañerapartner destroyed her Aunt Lola’s life.  It is not the prospect of a better decision that drives the plot, it is the inability of anyone to imagine any other decision.  

In “The Belindas,” a character with far more personal agency and power – a graduate of Columbia Law School is similarly destroyed by an errant boyfriend.  Again, this is a man who the reader identifies as trouble immediately.  The point is not that Belinda is simply making a poor choice, but that she sees no other choice.  The irony here is that her co-worker, Lola, who seems to be boy-crazy and without ambition, leaves Belinda to go off to college as we realize that she has been toying with the idea of men in a way that frees her up for other ambitions.

While there are one or two older men of decency and faithfulness in this volume, much of it could be the female side of a Junot Diaz story.  Ironically, as this is published by The Feminist Press, Diaz’s women have more power and self-awareness than Rodriguez’s, while the link between Dominican culture and sexism is more powerful for Diaz than such a link in Puerto Rican culture is for Rodriguez.  

In the final story, from which the collection takes its name, “Love War Stories,” the link among those words is made manifest.  These are not love stories, but love war stories.  Here the narrator leads a group of high school girls in a defense of true love in the face of their mother’s cynicism.   While the narrator’s mother lives the constricted life of a middle-aged working single mother, her daughter stands up for the idea of romance and true love. The interest in this story comes from the fact that the narrator has convinced her various girlfriends to act out this defense by dating and falling in love with various boys who “quickly start reneging on a thousand pledges made thought the course of the relationships,” while the narrator herself stays unattached.  She has recognized the only way to maintain the idea of true love – and hold out the prospect of being happier than her mother – is to never test love in any form.  She watches her girlfriends get hurt and take their mothers’ side in the war over love stories because letting them lose is the only way to maintain her own faith. Like Lola in “The Belindas,” she needs to convert love into a game she is willing to lose before taking it up.

I was drawn to this volume as a way to enhance a trip to Puerto Rico and because it had been short listed for prominent awards.  On the first cause, I could have used more research, since the book has little to do with Puerto Rico:  more stories are set in Central Mass than in San Juan.  As to its status as a near-award winner, I remain surprised.  The volume has an admirable coherence, but none of the stories is particularly original or memorable.  None of them are bad, but that is partly because they never risk any kind of failure – they mark off familiar territory and re-cover already examined ground in a way that is pleasant and innocuous, but hardly exciting or moving.