The Wild Roses

This is what Carol Martinez herself tells about her latest novel, filled with both joy and sorrow, but also with a lot of poetry:

“Shortly after The Threads of the Heart came out, a reader told me about a Spanish custom observed in Andalusia, the homeland of her family. When the woman felt that her end was near, she sewed a pillow in the shape of a heart and stuffed it with scraps of paper on which she wrote her secrets. After her death, the pillow was inherited by her eldest daughter, who was strictly forbidden to open it.

I turned this reader into the heroine of my new novel. Lola lives alone in a room above the post office where she works, and her greatest – and only – joy is her garden. She only carries pictures of her flowers in her wallet, and the closet in her room is full of fabric hearts left by the women of her Spanish lineage. And Lola wonders if she was created by the family history contained within these forbidden hearts, of which she knows nothing. Was her personal history written by those who preceded her? She would have to tear the hearts to find out…”