Prima Hermana

Two girls arrive in Nebraska with nothing that matches - not their ages, not their surnames, not even, at first, their claim on each other. Esther has been raised by Ofelia since she was five, in a Havana apartment where love came stitched into hemlines and folded into bread. Lourdes barely knows her at all. But when Operation Pedro Pan sends them both north, alone, into the care of strangers, the two of them build something neither girl was given by blood: a sisterhood invented out of necessity, then chosen, then defended, one hard year at a time - through diner shifts at a dollar fifty an hour, a one-room apartment above a stranger's garage, and the particular loneliness of being a child no government form quite knows how to name.