Key themes
- Food as the medium for suppressed emotion — and the body that transmits it
- The daughter who must sacrifice everything for convention
- Mexican family life and its specific forms of female imprisonment
About this book
A young woman pours her forbidden love into her cooking, with magical results; sensual and bittersweet.
Published in Spanish in 1989 and English in 1992, Like Water for Chocolate was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. It was adapted into a film in 1992. Esquivel is Mexican and the novel draws on her own family history.
Discussion questions
- Tita's emotions infuse the food she cooks — the guests who eat her tears or her longing experience them directly. What is Esquivel saying through this magical conceit about the relationship between food, women and suppressed feeling?
- Mama Elena is the novel's great tyrannical mother. How does Esquivel develop her — as monster, as product of her own suffering, or as both?
- The novel follows the Mexican revolutionary period from the kitchen. How does Esquivel connect the domestic and the political — and what does the kitchen's perspective add?
- The novel is structured as twelve monthly recipes, one per chapter. What does this cookery-book form achieve — and how does the recipe as a literary form serve the feminist argument?
- Like Water for Chocolate was a global sensation — one of the first Latin American feminist novels to reach a mass international readership. What specific appeal does it have outside its Mexican context?
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