Summary.

Hey. I'm going to do a summary for each chapter cause I think it's easier that way, since the story isn't told in order.

So.. Chapter 1-Antojos

Yolanda returns to the Dominican Republic for the first time in five years. Her aunts and cousins celebrate her return with a cake shaped like the Island. She goes to the north by herself to pick some guavas to eat. She stops at a cantina to ask the woman there where to find guavas. The woman's grandson, Jose, and other little boys goes with her to pick guavas. When they were all ready to leave, they got a flat tire. Yolanda sends Jose to the mansion for help. While she's waiting, she encounters two men, who want to help her. But, she becomes too frightened to speak or move. When asked if she was an American, she begins to speak to them in English. The men changed the tire for her and Yolanda heads back on the road. She finds Jose, who tells her that the guard at the mansion had hit him for telling lies. The guard didn't believe that a Dominican woman would be out late alone getting guavas.

Chapter 2-The Kiss

The four girls would always celebrate their father's birthday. For his seventieth birthday, Sofia wanted the party to be at her house, and managed to include the girls' husbands. There was tension between Sofia and her father because when she was young, she left home to be with her boyfriend. They had lost interest in each other and broke up. A few days later, Sofia met Otto, a German man, in Columbia. When the father found her love letters, he became enraged and accused her of destroying his reputation. She ran away from home and got married with Otto. Sofia wanted to reunite with her father again, so she organized his 70th birthday party. But, when the father didn't include her in his daughter count, her feelings were hurt.

Chapter 3-The Four Girls

The girls' mother would sometimes confuse the girls' names, their birthdates, or their careers. But, the mother liked to tell stories about each girl on special occasions. At Carla's wedding, her mother told a story about how Carla, as a child, really wanted red sneakers. Carla and her father had painted the white sneakers they got from a neighbor with red nail polish. Yolanda wanted to be a poet, but became a schoolteacher instead. At Yolanda's poetry reading, her mother told Clive, a professor and Yolanda's boyfriend, a story about how her daughter has a great imagination and how as a child, she would lose all her hair. The mother also told him how Yolanda used to recite poems on the bus. At the hospital, the mother told a story to a young man about how lucky Sofia is. But, the mother doesn't tell any stories about Sandra. As a result of Sandra's dieting,  she had a mental breakdown, causing her parents to place her in a mental hospital.

-Janet Chen