Thank you so very much to the team at Flatiron Books for giving me the opportunity to be on this book tour for L.A. Weather by María Amparo Escandón. I appreciate you having me on this tour.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to María Amparo Escandón, Netgalley and Flatiron Books for this free copy. All quotes in this review are taken from the Advanced Reader Copy and may change in final publication.

Stories about family dynamics have always been interesting to me. It makes me think about my own family and our idiosyncrasies, and what someone would think about if they were reading about them. Each family has their own problems, and that’s no exception for the Alvarado family. While each of them have been successful in their own ways, they are also dealing with some things in their personal lives. When someone has issues in their personal life, does that come from their family issues or result in other family issues? Something to think about.

One of the things that I liked reading about was how the family was dealing with the end of a marriage. When there are children involved – even grown children with their own lives and own love lives – it feels like things get that much harder to deal with. I could feel that while I read reading this, and seeing how each member of the Alvarado family is coping and dealing with some life changing decisions.

I thought that this was a beautiful and powerful story, one that really shows the intricacies of human nature, how none of us are perfect, and how even though we can be irritable and difficult to deal with all the time, we still need to learn how to get back to maintaining healthy relationships with our family. Of course, if the relationship is very toxic and one or more parties aren’t willing to change their behavior to undo the toxicity, then I agree with ending it and maintaining distance, even if they are family.

I would love to read more stories from María Amparo Escandón and I’m glad that I had the pleasure of reading this one.

FORECAST: Storm clouds are on the horizon in this fun, fast-paced novel of an affluent Mexican-American family from the author of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller Esperanza’s Box of Saints.

L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He’s harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters—Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her lovers—are blindsided and left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way.

With quick wit and humor, Maria Amparo Escandón follows the Alvarado family as they wrestle with impending evacuations, secrets, deception, and betrayal, and their toughest decision yet: whether to stick together or burn it all down.

María Amparo Escandón is a Mexican born, US resident, best-selling bilingual novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film producer. Her award-winning work is known for addressing bicultural themes that deal with the immigration experience of Mexicans crossing over to the United States. Her stories concentrate on family relationships, loss, forgiveness, faith, and self-discovery. A linguist with a sharp ear for dialogue, she explores the dynamics of language in border sub-cultures and the evolution of Spanglish. Her innovative style of multiple voice narrations and her cleverly humorous, quirky, and compassionate stories with a feminine angle capture the magical reality of everyday life and place her among the top Latin American female writers. Her work has been translated into over 21 languages and is currently read in more than 85 countries.