"Away from her home in India to study Spanish, Bonita sits on a bench in El Jardin de San Miguel, Mexico, basking in the park's lush beauty, when she slowly becomes aware that she is being watched. An elderly woman approaches her, claiming that she knew Bonita's mother-that they had been friends when Bonita's mother had lived in Mexico as a talented young artist. Bonita tells the stranger that she must be mistaken; her mother was not a painter and had never travelled to Mexico. Though the stranger leaves, Bonita cannot shake the feeling that she is being followed. Days later, haunted by the encounter, Bonita seeks out the woman, whom she calls The Trickster, and follows her on a tour of what may, or may not, have been her mother's past. As a series of mysterious events brilliantly unfold, Bonita is unable to escape The Trickster's presence, as she is forced to confront questions of truth and identity, and specters of familial and national violence."--

Anita Desai's Rosarita is a small book focused on a single event -- a daughter's visit to Mexico where she meets a potentially crazy stranger who claims to have known her mother. The story follows the protagonist's exploration of Mexico with this stranger as she hears stories about her mother's supposed exploits and sees locations she may have stayed. Desai uses this plot very specifically to explore a single idea -- how the protagonist is dealing with her mother's death and her own lack of understanding of her mother's life by indulging this potential fantasy of a much richer existence than that of the mother she knew. Desai is a good writer who depicts both the locations in Mexico and the internal dynamics of the protagonist well, but what's best about this novel is how tight it is. We can never be totally sure what's true or not, and that is part of the point -- that the mother, being dead, is now out of reach and anything the protagonist is doing to come to terms with that is her own journey. Desai reinforces this in the moments she creates - the ruined school, the stranger's family, the women on the beach. That said, not much happens in this novel and it essentially is the somewhat aimless wandering of the protagonist around the country. Some members of NUBClub just couldn't find ways to connect with that. But most of us found it an elegant arc of closure for an unresolved loss and in that sense, while slight, Rosarita was a tight and well written story.