Eccentric Neighborhoods (signed PRESENTATION COPY to the Dust Jacket artist)

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998. This is a PRESENTATION COPY from the author to John Martinez, this book's dust jacket artist. It is inscribed by the author on the half-title page: "For Johnathan, Thank you for a beautiful work of art! Cordially, Rosario." Bright, clean, square, and tight. Sharp corners. The beautifully illustrated Dust Jacket is NOT price-clipped (24.00). No chips. No creases. No bookplate. No remainder mark. Pages are fresh and crisp. Bound in the original green boards with a black cloth spine lettered in shiny gold. From the Dust Jacket: "In ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS, National Book Award finalist Rosario Ferré tells the story of two families whose lives, loves, and steamy intrigues coincided with the demise of Puerto Rico's plantation society and the rise of the nouveaux riches. Elvira Vernet comes from a male-dominated family of merchants living in the Puerto Rican town of La Concordia. Her father, Santiago Vernet, and his four sons help transform Puerto Rico from a bucolic island where hunger is a part of the landscape into a bustling industrial society with all of its contradictions and attendant ills. Handsome, eloquent, and enormously successful, he can't help but charm his only daughter. Yet, in understanding her obsession with her father, Elvira must first come to terms with her mother, who died many years before, and whose family, the Rivas de Santillanas, had roots in an old plantation culture that could not survive the era of mechanization. ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS is an attempt to lay bare the psychological conflicts that determine the relationships between mothers and daughters, and it is also the story of Puerto Rico's transformation, from the beginning of the century, into a spearhead of the Caribbean. Lush, vibrant, and disarmingly funny, ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS confirms Rosario Ferré's reputation as one of the most colorful and captivating novelists in the Latin American tradition... ROSARIO FERRE is the author of THE YOUNGEST DOLL, SWEET DIAMOND DUST, and THE HOUSE ON THE LAGOON (FSG, 1995), among many other works. She is a frequent lecturer in the United States and lives in Puerto Rico.". INSCRIBED / SIGNED by the AUTHOR.. "First edition, 1998" (so stated). Hard Cover. Fine condition/Fine dust jacket. Illus. by Martinez, John (jacket art). 8vo. (x), 340pp.