Boarding Home

A halfway house is ostensibly a refuge for the mentally ill and those abandoned to poverty by their respective families. However, Rosales writes about a particular house — ruled by an abusive supervisor who sees the house as his personal kingdom and occasionally uses its residents for his sexual pleasures. The central characters are a Cuban American man in his thirties and his equally mentally unstable love, a young woman in her twenties, who try to flee the halfway house. Saddled down by his books and her numerous belongings, they only manage to get far enough away for a taste of real freedom. Sad, tender, and dark, The Halfway House introduces an important Cuban writer to American readers.