Magdalena

Aimee Liu, President of PEN USA West (author of Cloud Mountain)
Set 20th century East Asia and by turns erotic and tragic, MAGDALENA vividly depicts three generation of strong Filipino women.


Rocio G. Davis (author of Transcultural Reinventions)
In this novel, Brainard blends a series of multiple perspectives to create a polyphony of voices that enacts Philippine society.


Linda Ty Casper (author The Stranded Whale)
With her second novel, Magdalena, Cecilia Brainard adds new portraits to the gallery in Philippine literature.


N.V.M. Gonzalez
I have been looking for a good story about the war - (upon reading the chaper "Winning Hearts and Minds."


Felice Prudente Sta. Maria
Cecilia's Diary tells all.


Book Description
CECILIA'S DIARY 1962-1969 collects diary entries by award-winning author, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, when she was a teenager.


From the Publisher
That life can be lived richly and generously is a message in CECILIA'S DIARY that teens everywhere need to hear, as they also need to realize from reading this book how keeping a diary can add a dynamic dimension to the ordinary events of daily life.


From the Author
My diary begins in 1962, three years after my father's death, three years after paradise ended. In 1962, I was in Manila with my mother and sister. I attended high school at St. Theresa's College, San Marcelino. School and religion provided stability to my life that was dominated by a high-strung mother. I disliked Manila for its largeness, dirtiness, and for the lifestyle we now had that was different from the quiet, elegant, and loving one in Cebu. And yet, it was in Manila where my life's goals started to take shape. Will I be a nun? Will I get married? And then an idea had entered my head that I wanted to be an engineer, perhaps because my father had been one. But despite my verbal profession of wanting to follow my father's footsteps, I started writing and reading. It was that personal loneliness, sadness, and insecurity that made me pick up a black folder, the kind used in school, and imitating Anne Frank, start: "That you may help me know myself better, and I might learn to confide all in a friend, to provide the future a record."


From the Inside Flap
Reading Cecilia's Diary 1962-1969 recaptures especially for those who lived their teenage years during that time period, the sweet innocence of a bygone era when a sixteen-year-old girl still waited for her first kiss. And yet, there is a timelessness about the joyous anticipations and thrilling moments, the trials and tribulations of teens everywhere and in every age that Cecilia in mid-adolescence confesses to her diary, her friend Sharon. Besides its appeal to the youth, this book provides for students of literature as well as for educators and psychologists, a substantive, insightful and interesting document of a rarely documented life of a teenage colegiala. ~ by Herminia Menez


About the Author
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is the multi-award author and editor of 11 books, including the internationally-acclaimed novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Magdalena, Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults, and others. She has received a California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction, a Brody Arts Fund Award, a Special Recognition Award from the Los Angeles City Board of Education for her work dealing with Asian American youths. She has also received a Certificate of Recognition from the California State Senate, 21st District. She teaches creative writing at UCLA-Extension's Writers Program.


Excerpted from Magdalena by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
~1962~ (Manila) Tuesday, October 10, 1962 Dear Sharon, Tonight is one of those times when I feel lonely, sort of incomplete. So, I thought I'd begina diary. My birthday was November 21, 1947, two years after Philippine Independence. Now, I'm almost fifteen years olf. I was baptized, as my sister said, a week later, as Cecilia Catalina Cuenco Manguerra. I added one more to a family of five. My father, Mariano Flores Manguerra, studied in Valparaiso University in Indiana. He became a professor at the young age of twenty-one. He was a civil engineer. He taught at the University of the Philippines. My mother, Concepcion Cuenco, was a student at the U.P. My father was around fifteen years older than my mother. For this reason, my grandfather (Cuenco) didn't allow their marriage. He turned my father down three times. One Sunday, Mama went to church. My father met her. They were going to elope! My Mama kept saying no but followed him just the same. They finally got married. My Mama was twenty years old. I'll continue tomorrow. ~


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices