I’m happy to share with you an excerpt from my latest work of fiction.
In the grey pulse of Toronto’s streets, ten-year-old Rodrigo feels the world shift beneath his feet—his parents gone, sent back to Portugal to get their immigration papers in order, and left with the two people who love him most but whose love feels like a language he hasn’t quite learned. Vovó, his grandmother, has skin like cracked leather and hands that smell of stale bread and Noxzema. Her stories curl around him like the thick smoke of the stove she never stops tending. Uncle Johnny, who always says the wrong things, tries to fill the spaces his silence leaves behind. Rodrigo, in the quiet spaces of this new life, holds tightly to what he knows—what’s left behind in the folds of memory and the echo of his parents’ last words.
In the dim-lit corners of their house on Euclid Ave in Toronto, the familiar and the unfamiliar blur—old photographs of a life they once knew, the unspoken promises of home, and a child’s reluctant acceptance of the ties that bind. Vovó’s Vignettes is the story of a family carved from the harshness of immigration and the gentle resilience that only family can offer—a tale of roots that sink deep even as the earth shifts.