Boléro

June M. Blurton is a retired speech/language pathologist.

Boléro is the story of a child’s betrayal by her egotistical mother.
As the novel opens, they are arriving for a short visit with the
child’s grandmother. The grandmother lives in a small, poor village in
Brazil, where she is the priestess of a local religious group and the
centre of all that happens in the village. The child does not expect
much to happen in three days, but she is proven wrong. Houses fall down,
a woman is killed and others are injured, an expensive jukebox is
broken, and a family feud comes into the open. Most devastating of all,
the child learns that she is being left with her grandmother (“just
for a few years”) while her adored mother gets her life in order.

There is real pain in the recounting of the mother’s betrayal.
Elsewhere, though, the clumsy prose style (a problem of translation?)
makes it difficult for the reader to feel empathy for any of the
characters.