Dancing with Butterflies, Reyna Grande
Dancing with Butterflies, Reyna Grande
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Dancing with Butterflies

Author: Reyna Grande

Narrator: Yareli Arizmendi, Marisa Blake, Elena Rey, Karla Serrato

Unabridged: 14 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/17/2024

Categories: Fiction, Women, Friendship


Synopsis

In Dancing with Butterflies, Reyna Grande renders the Mexican immigrant experience in “lyrical and sensual” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) prose through the poignant stories of four women brought together through folklorico dance.

Dancing with Butterflies uses the alternating voices of four very different women whose lives interconnect through a common passion for their Mexican heritage and a dance company called Alegría. Yesenia, who founded Alegría with her husband, Eduardo, sabotages her own efforts to remain a vital, vibrant woman when she travels back and forth across the Mexican border for cheap plastic surgery. Elena, grief-stricken by the death of her only child and the end of her marriage, finds herself falling dangerously in love with one of her underage students. Elena’s sister, Adriana, wears the wounds of abandonment by a dysfunctional family and becomes unable to discern love from abuse. Soledad, the sweet-tempered undocumented immigrant who designs costumes for Alegría, finds herself stuck back in Mexico, where she returns to see her dying grandmother.

Reyna Grande has brought these fictional characters so convincingly to life that listeners will imagine they know them.

About Reyna Grande

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author, motivational speaker, and writing teacher. As a young girl, she crossed the US–Mexico border to join her family in Los Angeles, a harrowing journey chronicled in The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her other books include the novels A Ballad of Love and GloryAcross a Hundred Mountains, and Dancing with Butterflies, the memoirs The Distance Between Us: Young Readers Edition, and Dream Called Home, and the anthology Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on MigrationSurvival, and New Beginnings. She lives in Woodland, California, with her husband and two children. Visit ReynaGrande.com for more information.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Yvonne on December 27, 2012

Excellent read! This folklorista can vouch for it's accuracy. Would love a sequel about Adriana!......more

Goodreads review by Nilsa on March 15, 2019

***SPOILER ALERT*** Ok, so here are my thoughts/things I want to discuss from the book: Yesenia - Do you think that we judge her actions more harshly because she is a woman? Do you believe that society still goes easier on men when they cheat? In regards to the surgeries, I couldn't help but think th......more

Goodreads review by Lizvette on March 13, 2019

4.5 ⭐️ It’s my second book by Reyna Grande. Definitely, not the last one. Her writing make me feel closer to her culture and experiences. Dancing with Butterflies is a book enriched in culture (music, dance, food, traditional clothing, festivities, traditions...). It was like opening a box full of m......more

Goodreads review by Meredith on May 11, 2010

I dance Mexican folkloric, and if there was this much drama going on in the studio we'd never perform. While it was nice reading about some of the dances and costumes and hearing terms and events common to the folkloric world (in California at least), a lot of the story was WAY over done. There were......more

Goodreads review by Candy on November 20, 2010

I read this for my book club this month. I really wanted to like it and it had some redeeming qualities. I loved learning about the dance, the cultural, the costumes. That part of it was so interesting. However, the stories were mind-numbing. The ladies were terrible, the stories were terrible. The w......more