Where the Sun Will Always Shine

Esmeraldas, Ecuador, is a beautiful place for a story to begin. But a beautiful beginning doesn't mean a story isn't complicated. Aracelly Contreras Borja's life-like everyone's, though perhaps more than some-has paired that beauty with sorrow, joys and mistakes walking hand-in-hand. All but abandoned by her father, abused by her mother, left alone with her siblings to struggle to make ends meet, Ara dreams of escape from the whirlpool of her family's pains.

Even escape, however, leads down dangerous roads. Ara is exploited and abused by unscrupulous employers, caught up in new struggles as her family comes and goes. Eventually, she falls in love, and he promises to sponsor her to emigrate, and then-

Well. It's complicated. Freedom from her family means loneliness in a land she can barely make herself understood in-this land of opportunity that doesn't seem to want to give her much of a chance to prove herself. Despair opens the ground up beneath her, and she finds herself trying to break the cycles she was born in for the sake of her children.

Does she? Well. Once again, it's complicated. Looking back on it all, Ara's greatest hope is that by laying open her life within these pages, she can at last make herself understood-and perhaps find forgiveness from those who matter most.