Waiting on Wednesday: When Tito Loved Clara by Jon Michaud

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine to highlight an upcoming release we can't wait to read.

My pick this week is When Tito Loved Clara by Jon Michaud.  Jon Michaud is the headl librarian at The New Yorker, but I didn't pick this book because I hope it's so successful he quits his job and The New Yorker wisely decides to hire me as their next librarian (although that longshot scenario would be fine with me). I picked it because I do have a fondness for books by and about librarians, but the plot of this novel sounds so interesting:

"Clara Lugo grew up in the Dominican neighborhood at the far northern reaches of Manhattan in a home that would have rattled the most grounded of children. Through brains and determination, she has slipped the bonds of her confining ethnic neighborhood and lives a quiet, professional life with her American husband and son in the suburbs of New Jersey--often thwarted by her constellation of relatives who don't always understand Clara's gringa ways.

But Clara's past catches up with her--most notably in the person of Tito: Clara's handsome high school boyfriend from fifteen years earlier. Something has interfered with Tito's early adulthood. He's an incomplete man who increasingly feels cursed. He carries a torch for Clara; Clara harbors a secret from Tito. Their meeting sets in motion an unraveling in both of their lives--an unraveling that reveals what the cost of assimilation--or absence of it--has been for each of them.

This immensely entertaining debut poses the question, does a striving child of immigrants have to sever ties with the past in order to move on and answers it with wit and compassion.

When Tito Loved Clara will be published March 8, 2011 by Algonquin Books. You can pre-order it now from Amazon or an independent bookstore.



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