Dancing with Butterflies: A Novel - Softcover

"Award-winning novelist Reyna Grande returns with a novel full of music, motion, and heart. Dancing with Butterflies is about four women whose stories and friendships are as rich as the Folklórico dance that brought them together. Grande is a novelist to watch." -- Tananarive Due, American Book Award-winning author of Blood Colony

"Just when you think you know all about friends, Grande comes along to teach you something else about love and its mysteries, about good conversation over beers, sacrifices one makes for family, and about the joys and sins of shoe-stomping pride." -- Helena María Viramontes, author of Their Dogs Came with Them

Dancing with Butterflies uses the alternating voices of four very different women whose lives interconnect through a common passion for their Mexican heritage and a dance company called Alegría. Yesenia, who founded Alegría with her husband, Eduardo, sabotages her own efforts to remain a vital, vibrant woman when she travels back and forth across the Mexican border for cheap plastic surgery. Elena, grief stricken by the death of her only child and the end of her marriage, finds herself falling dangerously in love with one of her underage students. Elena's sister, Adriana, wears the wounds of abandonment by a dys-functional family and becomes unable to discern love from abuse. Soledad, the sweet-tempered illegal immigrant who designs costumes for Alegría, finds herself stuck back in Mexico, where she returns to see her dying grandmother.

Reyna Grande has brought these fictional characters so convincingly to life that readers will imagine they know them.