Take Care of You by Cyndia Rios-Myers

Amanda Morales Robles is an eighteen-year-old girl who lives in the early 1990s in the town of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. She’s a senior in high school that has a lot on her plate. She has to mind her two teenaged siblings, Linda and Alex, as her mother Ada, a divorced woman, works hard and plays hard, too.

Amanda’s got a reasonable handle on her life; she does more for her siblings than she should, but that will change when she starts college the following year. However, her life derails when her sixteen-year-old sister Linda tells her that she is pregnant. Linda swears that the only way to handle the situation is for her to have a quick abortion in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, which is the beach town where they’d spent the previous summer. Amanda sees an abortion as her little sister’s only chance to resume a normal life. Little does she know that the Aguadilla abortion road trip is her sister Linda’s plan to escape with her boyfriend.

Amanda is left to pick up the pieces that Linda left when she abandoned her family. The years pass, but Amanda does not recover from the loss of her sister. But one day, Linda appears to Amanda and tells her that she abandoned her family because she went to live in the underworld kingdom of her lover. Amanda doesn’t believe her, of course, but is still entranced by her story, as well as Linda’s promise that she can only visit her sister three more times within her lifetime.

Do the three subsequent visits happen? Does Amanda believe Linda? Does Amanda try to find out the truth about where her sister went to? Will she find it in her to forgive her sister?

Take Care of You is a story of love lost and growing up. You be able to put this story down only when you determine who is looking after whom.