Carrying in Her Head
Florida Calliope Casimiro had the stories. She always had the stories.
Growing up in northern New Jersey as a first-generation Portuguese American, she studied Illustration with plans to write and illustrate children's books. Then life took its usual turns: motherhood, a career in education aligned with her daughter's school schedule, and twenty years of teaching she genuinely loved. The writing waited.
It didn't go anywhere, though. The characters she'd been carrying around kept developing, kept demanding attention, kept getting more complicated and more real. Eventually, they got their book.
That book is Reminders of You, a dual-timeline romance that follows Sam Aitkens as he reads through the journal left behind by Catarina Bonita, the woman who was his first and most defining love. Through her entries, a summer in London's West End comes back to life: the theater world, the friendships, the specific electricity of two people who recognize each other immediately and spend the entire summer pretending they don't.
But the journal does something else, too. It shows Sam the interior of a story he only ever experienced from the outside. Catarina's thoughts, her fears, her private accounting of what happened between them all slowly dismantle the narrative Sam has been living with for years. The ending he accepted as inevitable turns out to be something far more ordinary and preventable.
That's the emotional territory the novel occupies, the space between grief and revelation, between what was and what could have been. Casimiro handles it without melodrama and without false comfort. The book trusts its readers to sit with complicated feelings, and readers have been responding to that trust.
Reminders of You has received editorial praise from the US Review of Books, BlueInk Review, and the American Writing Awards. It has earned six awards across romance, women's fiction, and romantic drama, including finalist placements in the American Writing Awards, Literary Global Book Awards, and International Impact Book Awards, plus a third-place finish in the Digital Book Today Romance category.
Casimiro is a certified elementary school teacher who lives on a lakeside farm in Florida with her husband and rescued animals. She is actively engaged with readers online and available for interviews and book club conversations.
Reminders of You is available on Amazon and through Archway Publishing.