Close to midnight, when the heart bows from its stem, wait for its first dew. It will drop like a gem. Catch it with your tongue. When you eat the heart of the matter, you’ll never grow hungry again.” The myth of the banana heart inspires twelve-year old Nenita. She will appease her family’s hunger and win her mother’s love. As she cooks and eats, or dreams of cooking and eating, other love stories unfold in her street, sweltering between a volcano and a church during the hottest summer in the 1960s. In this sensuous, poignant and quirky feast, smoky coconut chicken in green papayas, sticky rice with sweet anise, or spicy and sorrowful peccadillos whet and challenge the palate and the heart—how to endure this delectable argument of flavors; how to find the balance between love and anger. Touching, funny, elegiac, this is a truly original book.

Banana Heart Summer is a coming-of-age that follows Nenita, the twelve-year-old eldest daughter of a poor family of six. In the sweltering heat of Remedios Street, the myth of the banana heart wafts through a community burdened by secrets, hungers, and heartbreaks, as Nenita herself works to win her mother's love.