Title: Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution
Author: Lusita López Torregrosa
Genre: Memoir
Year: 2012
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Acquired: From the publisher for participation in a book tour with TLC Book Tours
Rating: 
Review: In 1985, Lusita López Torregrosa was married to her career as an editor on the foreign desk at a major American newspaper. Recently out of a relationship, Torregrosa’s work provided “a semblance of ordinary life” at a time when she was struggling. Then Elizabeth entered the picture, a “bookish and terribly proper” writer for the newspaper’s city desk. When Elizabeth is given the opportunity to serve as a foreign reporter in the Philippines, Torregrosa decides to follow her. While there, the women make a life for themselves in a country marred by political turmoil. When they are forced to return to the United States, however, their relationship struggles to breathe in this new place.
Before the Rain is as much a love story to the Philippines as it is a story about two women building their lives together. Torregrosa’s writing of place is stunning and lush and just so lovely to read – it’s impossible to not be transported every time she writes about their experiences in this new place. I loved, for example, this closing scene from Torregrosa’s first visit to the Philippines, just before she decides to take a leave of absence from her job to spend a year writing so she can be with Elizabeth:
We took a dirt road past shacks and beer stalls and at the end of it we found the resort, the main building a large, airy shed of concrete with a tin roof. It wasn’t the enchanting pavilion, the white beaches, we had in mind, but having gone so far and having a day to ourselves, we ran up to the reception desk and signed up for a raft. Cheap, ten pesos for half a day. …
Out on the water there were dozens of bancas, narrowly-tailed boats, loaded with families. Vendors in cutoff shorts and rubber sandals, their skin charcoaled in the sun, their bodies fish-bony and sinewy, waded through the water, carrying boxes of food, beer, and ice cream. We hired two of them to pull our bamboo raft into the water and they anchored it about two hundred feet from the shore. …
The water was so clear you could see the bottom. Elizabeth dived in and out, and I dangled my legs off the raft, splashing water on my face and arms to keep cool. I rarely went into the water. I only wanted to smell it, to feel it near me, to feel it like the air. I watched her body swivel, and the changing light on the waves, and the sun spots skittering under water. Around us the boats swayed, like floating huts. Kids jumped naked into the sea, teenagers danced to boom boxes, and men tossed their empty bottles over their shoulders. …
She stretched out on the raft to dry in the sun, her hand shading her eyes while she looked at me. We were alone in the world, it seemed, hardly stirring, swaying softly with the waves. …
I think Torregrosa really has the reporter’s instinct of telling details, and uses the skill so well when writing about place. Unfortunately, she doesn’t quite match that level of awesome when writing about people.
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements preceed it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
Winn Van Meter is heading for his family’s retreat on the pristine New England island of Waskeke. Normally a haven of calm, for the next three days this sanctuary will be overrun by tipsy revelers as Winn prepares for the marriage of his daughter Daphne to the affable young scion Greyson Duff. Winn’s wife, Biddy, has planned the wedding with military precision, but arrangements are sideswept by a storm of salacious misbehavior and intractable lust: Daphne’s sister, Livia, who has recently had her heart broken by Teddy Fenn, the son of her father’s oldest rival, is an eager target for the seductive wiles of Greyson’s best man; Winn, instead of reveling in his patriarchal duties, is tormented by his long-standing crush on Daphne’s beguiling bridesmaid Agatha; and the bride and groom find themselves presiding over a spectacle of misplaced desire, marital infidelity, and monumental loss of faith in the rituals of American life. (
In 1920, Elsa Emerson, the youngest and blondest of three sisters, is born in idyllic Door County, Wisconsin. Her family owns the Cherry County Playhouse, and more than anything, Elsa relishes appearing onstage, where she soaks up the approval of her father and the embrace of the audience. But when tragedy strikes her family, her acting becomes more than a child¹s game of pretend.
