'Flores and Miss Paula' are a mother and daughter who try to connect in 'dishy' novel

In Melissa Rivero's lively "Flores and Miss Paula," a mother and her grown daughter share a Brooklyn apartment that is too empty despite its modest size.

As Rivero's second novel opens, Martín Flores, the loving husband and father who mediated between the two women, has been dead for three years. After he died, his widow Paula took a job she relishes at a discount store called DollaBills but her earnings don't cover the necessities. A relative bilked her out of investments she and Martín made in their native Peru, so she relies on daughter Mónica for financial support. Despite their close quarters, secrets flourish between the women, whose grief over Martín remains sharp.

Mónica, 33, is contemplating freezing her eggs and, at work, goes by her last name Flores, which she prefers to being misremembered as Maria. Plus, using a surname like a sports star signals her insider status in the fratty world of an "aquatic creation" startup called the Bowl, where she leads the finance department. Hired straight out of grad school, she works long hours in the hope the company will be sold and that cashing in on her stock options will allow her to pay off the six-figure loans with which she financed her education and keeps her parents afloat.

As a first generation college graduate with immigrant parents, Flores lives in two worlds at once — the fast-paced, high-tech modern world of her job, and that of old-fashioned traditions and familial devotion she learned from her family. "I always knew I'd have to take care of my parents at some point," she explains, "but I didn't expect it to be this soon."

As the novel begins, Flores receives notice that their apartment's lease won't be renewed. She also finds a note her mom hid under Martín's urn, seeming to beg his forgiveness for some past transgression, which Flores has suspicions about.

Flores won't actually ask about the note, just as Paula won't ask her daughter what's become of her love life since she broke up with her long-term boyfriend and moved back home. The women love each other but fail to connect. Told in alternating first-person chapters in the two women's distinctive voices, the structure of the book satisfies a reader's gossip craving. The narrators divulge what each of them hides from the other, and we turn the pages to find out when all will be revealed.

Both women are at a crossroads. Flores overworks herself as she tries to grow out of the constraints of her first adult decisions — about school, work and love — and ease her way into a more comfortable fit. Paula is from a generation and culture in which those first decisions often defined a lifetime, but with the loss of the husband she based her future on, she too has to evolve toward a plan B.

In a novel that is by turns dishy and soulful, Rivero braids depictions of the frivolity and self-seriousness of start-up life with the authentic and connected culture of Peruvian immigrants in New York City.

Jenny Shank wrote the story collection "Mixed Company" and novel "The Ringer." She'll next review "The Storm We Made."

Flores and Miss Paula

By: Melissa Rivero.

Publisher: Ecco, 272 pages, $29.