A House for the Unclaimed Summer
In the late summer of 1946, sixteen-year-old Lidia Santos works as a bilingual clerk in a California citrus company town, copying shipping manifests and smoothing over daily conflicts. When her father suffers a crippling packinghouse injury, the Sierra Vista Citrus Company issues an abrupt ten-day demolition notice requiring her family to vacate their company bungalow.
While searching family papers, Lidia discovers an old housing-assignment letter promising Bungalow 12 to four seasonal workers who disappeared after organizing a safety petition in 1938. Partnering with Tomás Alvarez, a sharp peer whose own family lost their citrus grove during wartime incarceration, Lidia begins uncovering survey revisions, hidden payroll deductions, and municipal records.
As the ten-day deadline looms, Lidia uncovers an uncomfortable family compromise: her grandfather secured their home by opposing the displaced workers' petition. To stop the demolition, Lidia must decide whether to conceal the past or present the unvarnished record before the county board.
A House for the Unclaimed Summer is an intimate, atmospheric historical novel exploring labor, inheritance, and the courage required to tell the whole truth about home.
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The paper cut Lidia's finger before she even knew what it was.
She had one hand under her father's pillow, searching for the little brown bottle Dr. Halpern had told Elena to keep near Rafael at night. Rafael slept badly since the packinghouse press caught his hand. He slept with his jaw tight and one shoulder lifted, as if pain might come back for whatever it had missed.
"Don't wake him," Elena had said from the kitchen. "He needs the rest."
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