When she was small Talia often asked her father the meaning of the word. Home. Sometimes she understood it meant a house or an apartment, the place a person returned to at the end of a long day. The place where one's family lived even if they left a long time ago. The place one felt most comfortable.
-- Talia (chapter 2)

Importance: This quote introduces one of the novel's major themes—how one's sense of home might be disturbed or divided by immigration and separation from one's family. The narrator goes on to say that for Talia, home has always been "a space occupied by her grandmother Perla" (12), but that she also understood this was not the entire story for her. Home was also in the United States, where she was born, where her mother and siblings lived, even if she had no memory of this place and only saw these family members over...