Tea Brewing Tales From The Tongue Of Tita’s Diary

Are yall ready for Laura Esquivel and a side of Like Water For Chocolate you missed?

Sit on down and dive into Tita’s Diary that holds the secrets and lies of the De La Garza family. Once of the reasons I’m featuring this is because I fucking can for one, and for two Laura Esquivel is very much an indie author these days (this book was published from the abysmal, terrible, fucked up ass KDP/Amazon which is a waste and a shame but I digress), and has been for the subsequent follow ups to her most famous work (which is Like Water For Chocolate in case you don’t understand inference). Like Water For Chocolate was released some thirty years ago so the fact that Ms. Laura is out there still hanging in there deserves the flowers I’m about to throw. I’ve read this now in Spanish about six times and English twice – the Spanish version is the easiest version to find and since I know the language well enough to read in it it’s nice to see how the author intended the work without a translation curve.

Let me just say I fucking LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE Like Water For Chocolate.  It’s one of the first novels I ever read in another language just to keep getting that life. Having said that, Tita’s Diary is the same very extensive diary Tita kept (hence the name) that she filled with recipes and the inspirations behind them which were all based around her fucked up love life. Now some of yall might be wondering about the diary’s existence. This is what Esparanza found after the farm burned down at the end of Like Water For Chocolate after she returned back from her honeymoon with John’s son. So this is more or less a companion novel which is the first person retelling of its source material.

In the OG book (for the uninitiated) Tita was forbidden from ever being married and damned to care for her fucked up mother because Mama Elena came from a fucked up ass family where the baby girl had to essentially be a slave to her mother until she died. So Tita is born and Daddy De La Garza has a heart attack the day she’s born once his fucked up ass friends getting to talking shit about how Mama Elena tipped out on him with a black dude (which is later revealed to have been killed in a racially motivated act) that resulted in her sister Gertrudis. So of course she’s the prettiest and the dude next door wants her. That just spins off sneaking, creeping, wrongful couplings, misunderstanding, and a roller coaster of fucked up shit that ends in even more fucked up shit. In Tita’s Diary you get to read Tita’s personal thoughts and perspectives about things that follow along with Like Water For Chocolate but are a bit intimate and personal than the rest.

What I love about the diary is that we really get Tita’s words on how she feels about a lot of shit from the OG book, specifically Rosaura marrying her man, her random thoughts on Mama Elena’s cruelty especially in death, Chencha’s thotness, Gertrudis being “different” aka showing Negroesque traits until she gets definitive proof that she is in fact a mulatto, Pedro before during and after his marriage, John and her confliction of loving him but not being in love with him, and of course the patron saint of all good mother figures Nacha, who helps Tita in life and death. Standout parts are really about Gertrudis, especially when she ran off with who became her husband and her triumphant return. I feel the love between them and the distance that was always there between her and Rosaura and grew as Rosaura slowly morphed into Mama Elena until she died (which she pretty much flatulenced herself to death once she got to battling Tita about Esparanza).

Now let’s talk about the book cover.  It’s kind of shit. In fact it’s not exactly what I would have went with but it gets the concept of it being the burned journal down. Didn’t imagine it had a lock on it as destructive as Mama Elena was breaking watermelons a simple book lock she could sneeze and open without much force.  Now the inside of the book is pure hell. I get the journal idea and its cute, but not for a novel. The entire novel is released in handwriting script. It’s hard to read and even harder to make out on the pages. There isn’t enough contrast between the color of the words and the color of the pages to make it easy to read without eye strain and a fucking headache. Indie book or no indie book that needs help. Amazon release or no Amazon release as a novel we need a Garamond font. As a collectable attached to a Garamond font it wouldn’t have been okay, like a bonus deluxe edition or something.

Overall, if you’re a fan of the first book get it and struggle through it and get that life. If you’ve never read Like Water For Chocolate you won’t appreciate this and will hate it with a passion because of the handwriting thing. I feel like Ms. Laura put this out for the fans, as well as the other loose sequel that follows Rosaura’s brood as they reconnect with Tita and the rest of their crazy ass family. And ain’t nothing wrong with that. I want to see her sell a lot of these like she did in the OG book days. Just please, no adaptation TV show. You’re not going to outdo the original and it will be milking the dead fucking horse that should stay buried.