Monsoon mansion
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Cinelle Barnes
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
ISBN-13: 9781542046138; 9781542046145
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: Families; Family; Dysfunctional families; Coming of age; Mothers and daughters; Women; Childhood and youth; Biography; History
Description: Told with a lyrical, almost-dreamlike voice as intoxicating as the moonflowers and orchids that inhabit this world, Monsoon Mansion is a harrowing yet triumphant coming-of-age memoir exploring the dark, troubled waters of a family's rise and fall from grace in the Philippines. It would take a young warrior to survive it. Cinelle Barnes was barely three years old when her family moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home in the Philippines. Filled with her mother's opulent social aspirations and the gloriously excessive evidence of her father's self-made success, it was a girl's storybook playland. But when a monsoon hits, her father leaves, and her mother's terrible lover takes the reins, Cinelle's fantastical childhood turns toward tyranny she could never have imagined. Formerly a home worthy of magazines and lavish parties, Mansion Royale becomes a dangerous shell of the splendid palace it had once been. In this remarkable ode to survival, Cinelle creates something magical out of her truth--underscored by her complicated relationship with her mother. Through a tangle of tragedy and betrayal emerges a revelatory journey of perseverance and strength, of grit and beauty, and of coming to terms with the price of family--and what it takes to grow up.
Table of contents: title: Garden party; title: Orchids in the morning; title: Falling; title: Common enemy; title: Elma; title: Gilded; title: Forty days; title: Mama, come back; title: Desert of his mind; title: Elvis face; title: Jeepney joyride; title: Creatures, great and small; title: Library; title: Aqua vitae; title: Woman at the well; title: Sleep now; title: Election day; title: Monsoon manifesto; title: Not water, but whiskey; title: No fisher of men; title: Millennium; title: the season of the Sun.