The Love You Promised Me

Mexican writer Molina's second novel to be published in English (after Gray Skies Tomorrow) is a sentimental, unsatisfying love story about an extramarital affair. As the story opens in the mid-1990s (Mexico's turbulent political situation gets a nod), Marcela, an advertising writer who lives in Mexico City with her husband and two teenaged boys, finds herself in a hotel in a small town on the Gulf of Mexico, nursing a broken heart and hinting portentously at ""disorder and chaos"" in her life. She begins to read a collection of letters from her ex-lover Eduardo, a married doctor 20 years her senior who has declared his love to her and then withdrawn it. The abandoned port town of San L zaro is also where her now-deceased father grew up in a wealthy family. When she is not digging in Eduardo's letters for answers to his about-face, Marcela unearths clues to the shameful past of her father's family's --notably its exploitation of Indian workers--and discovers that her mother was a maid. Molina just skims the surface of her story, reducing Marcela's conflicts to clich s. Eduardo comes across through his letters as patronizing, while Marcela's lawyer husband, Rafael, and two unidentified sons exist merely as background. Marcela sets out to know herself, but the answers she comes home with seem to be of little help when, after returning to her husband, she encounters Eduardo in a restaurant. Sketchy to begin with, and further handicapped by a choppy translation, Molina's novel fails to come to life. (Nov.) FYI: This novel won the 1999 Sor Juana In s de la Cruz Prize.