Francine Rodriguez’ Blog

Their Silent Language

A few years before my mother died in 2001, I was visiting her for her birthday. She told me that since it was her eightieth birthday, she was going out to eat with her friend that afternoon.  She pronounced the name of her friend; it was an Armenian name, and I don’t think she pronounced it correctly, because she always […]

Mexican Food For Real

I just finished reading Ally Wong’s excerpt from her new novel, that has a chapter on how to judge a good Asian restaurant. Everything she said made a lot of sense, and I started thinking about how you pick a good authentic Mexican restaurant, because there is a Mexican restaurant on every corner, every place you go. Since I’m a […]

Accessory To His Death

Jeffrey stood out from the rest of us. His skin was a lot whiter for one thing. A lot whiter because he came from one of those really white-skinned families that moved here from the mid-west or someplace like that. Some place where people only came in the palest shades of white, so translucent that you could see the blue veins peeking through. Jeffrey’s round freckled face and his plump little legs in his plaid madras or seersucker shorts, burned a deep scarlet any time the sun fought its way through the smog and burned down on the pavement near downtown Los Angeles.

A Woman Like Me Review by lfm1223

Reviewed by: lfm1223 3 out of 4 stars Francine Rodriguez has written a very compelling novel about one woman’s journey through her largely difficult life. A Woman Like Me follows Genie, a transgender woman, as she tells her troubling life story full of hardships. The story starts with a boy growing up in Thailand and ends with a woman on the run […]

ARE DEMOCRATS AS WOKE AS THEY THINK?             After the results of the last Democratic contest, it was pretty obvious that voters were not interested in the female candidates, at least not in South Carolina.  So why is that?             You probably won’t find many people who will openly admit they wouldn’t vote for a woman candidate. In fact, a […]

What’s Wrong With You Oprah and the Rest of You Agents and Literary Publishers?

I finally got around to reading Oprah’s review of American Dirt.  I have to say I didn’t read the book myself, because when I skimmed through it, it looked like a dozen other books I’ve seen about poor uneducated Mexicans living the immigrant’s struggle.  So far that’s pretty much the total of what I’ve seen in the way of literature […]