After a while, both Mama Elena and Rosaura die, leading to a night of passion for the true lovers... but all does not end well, as Pedro dies happily making love to Tita; Tita is tormented by the ghost of her mother, and, feeling nothing but loneliness, she begins to eat matches and candles. Pedro’s memory sparks a flame within her that consumes Tita, Pedro, and the entire ranch, leaving ashes. The story is revealed to be told by Esperanza, who is getting ready to marry Alex. She also states that in the ashes of the ranch, Tita’s cookbook was found, from whence come all the recipes mentioned. 

	I was introduced to this book and the film when I was 16, in an all-girl, private Catholic school. At that age, all of us in the class (ranging from me, the youngest, to age 19) wanted anything we could get away with in terms of sexuality and male nudity. I can see why, to a parent, that might be problematic, especially in today’s political climate. While the book makes mostly fleeting mentions, the corresponding film is R-rated for sexuality and full frontal nudity, both male and female. However, it was presented to us more as an introduction to the genre of Magic Realism, a gateway to more complicated works like Cien Años de Soledad (“100 Years of Solitude”), than anything from which we should adopt lifestyle choices. 

While I would not be able to personally use these resources at this time (teaching middle school), I highly recommend them for other teachers teaching high school or college students. One of my college professors once told her Teaching Foreign Languages class (which I was unfortunately not a part of) that the number two rule of being a successful teacher (after “Work to develop your ‘teacher handwriting’) was “Talk about sex every now and then. Your students WILL pay attention.” The book is fairly easy to read, with fairly simple verb tenses and sentence structure, and can easily be incorporated into different types of lessons: we had it incorporated into a review of food words, but it could also be used for a unit on the Mexican Revolution of in literary genres classes, especially for Magic Realism and Bildungsroman. The teacher will have to ensure that the students are mature enough, as a whole, to handle what is being presented to them, but the book and the film are incredibly enriching looks at modern Mexican writing and filmmaking. 



The process of learning a foreign language is becoming more and more important as America and other countries are becoming increasingly diverse. In America, many schools now offer ELL (English Language Learning) courses of study for children of recent immigrants. The process of learning a language is important to help both children learning English from another language or older English-speakers learning a foreign language for the first time. 