An Island Like You is a peculiar book; unlike most novels, there isn’t an obvious main character. This book highlights 12 smaller individual stories from different individuals who live in the same Puerto Rican apartment building: The Barrio. Each short story contains different characters dealing with different issues. I’m only going to discuss one short story for this blog: “Bad Influence”. “Bad Influence” is about a young teenage girl from New Jersey named Rita. She and her best friend, Meli, were recently punished severely for their immature actions. Rita told her parents she was spending the night with Meli, and vice versa. Even though the two friends had used the aforementioned excuse countless times previously, they had never experienced an emergency during their dishonesty. Unfortunately, Meli’s mother suffered a severe health issue, and her father called Rita’s parents from the hospital so she would know about her mother’s illness. Several hours and multiple police calls later, both Rita and Meli were found alone together with their respective boyfriends: Johnny Ruiz and Joey.

            Both Rita and Meli were punished severely. Rita was given an ultimatum of two different punishments: she could attend a summer at a retreat for Catholic girls, or she could spend the summer in Puerto Rico with her grandparents. She would ultimately visit her grandparents. At first, she thought her grandfather, Juan, and her grandmother, Ana, were annoying, but she grew to enjoy their company. Her grandparents lived on a beach, but the beauty of the beach was soon forgotten. Her grandparent’s pet rooster would often get the time of day confused; therefore, he would cock-a-doodle-doo during the nighttime, rather than early morning. Rita began to develop a closer relationship with her grandparents, even though she initially made excuses to circumvent their existence. Rita would soon meet a new friend. Her grandfather, Juan, worked a job similar to the 1980’s film “The Ghostbusters”. He attempted to remove evil spirits from one’s home. In this story, he attempts to remove a spirit from the home of a television commercial actress and her daughter, Angela. Angela feels the evil of the spirit much worse than her mother. At the urging of Rita’s grandmother, she invites Angela to dinner. The two develop a friendship over the summer, and Rita forgets about her boyfriend. Even though Rita hated moving from her boyfriend, she developed a closer relationship with her grandparents, she met a new friend and she helped bring happiness to her new friend.