Of Women and Salt

January 15, 2021
An affluent Cuban immigrant reckons with her daughter's drug addiction and her own culpability in their self-destructive choices. As the book opens, it's 2018, and Carmen is writing in anguish to her daughter, Jeannette, begging her to find the will to live. Then we're immediately swept away to Camag�ey, Cuba, in 1866, right before the first Cuban war for independence from Spain, where we meet one of the women's ancestors. Mar�a Isabel works at a cigar factory, and, as the war blooms bright and bloody, she's pursued by the factory's lector, who reads newspapers and Victor Hugo novels to the workers as they roll cigars. If the novel had continued to offer rich scenes like these, it would have been a success, but from this point on, it feels haphazardly stitched together. We meet Jeannette in 2014, and then Carmen's and Jeanette's voices alternate erratically through different time periods, with little resonance between them--both strands of the narrative center the useless or even abusive men who litter the lives of all the family's women. Then, as if grafted onto the story, Garcia adds intermittent sections from the points of view of a woman named Gloria and her daughter, Ana, undocumented immigrants from El Salvador. Gloria is picked up by ICE agents while Ana is at a babysitter's house, and when the girl gets dropped off, Jeanette takes her in for a few nights before Carmen convinces her to call the police--a decision that will come to haunt Carmen. Even with snatches of gorgeously compelling prose, the book can't overcome the lack of relationship development among the women of the family in both Miami and Cuba. A Cuban family grapples with violence and addiction, but their relationships lack depth.

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February 1, 2021

DEBUT Garcia's debut novel tells two parallel stories of Latinx immigrant families. While the stories intersect near the beginning and end of the book, the women's experiences are as distinct as the cultures from which they come. At the story's center is Jeanette, whose mother, Carmen, emigrated from Cuba, cutting off all ties with her family. The family is impacted by multigenerational trauma caused by war, revolution, and abuse, and Jeanette struggles with drug addiction. When her neighbor, Gloria, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, is detained by ICE, Jeanette briefly takes in her daughter, Ana, who is inadvertently left behind. In nonsequential chapters, we follow the struggles of Jeanette and her family, as well as Gloria and Ana's harrowing experiences with the current U.S. immigration policies. VERDICT While the nonlinear structure of the narrative sometimes makes the story feel disjointed, Garcia has carefully layered the novel so that each chapter delivers revelations about the motivations and psychological burdens of the characters that add to understanding on the part of the reader (though not necessarily the characters, who are not always party to the secrets of their mothers or grandmothers). A relevant and timely work delivered with empathy.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

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March 1, 2021
Garcia turns her MFA thesis for Purdue University (where she studied with the revered Roxane Gay) into her widely buzzed first novel. Presented in 12 chapters that read more like interlinked stories, Garcia channels her Miami-based Cuban-Mexican American heritage into five generations of a Cuban American matriarchy. Garcia opens with a two-page prologue set in 2018 in Miami, introducing Jeanette, who is recovering from drug addiction and desperate to reclaim her life while navigating a complicated relationship with her mother, Carmen. The first chapter then jumps back to 1866 in Camag�ey, Cuba, to great-great-grandmother Mar�a Isabel, a hungry-for-more young woman anomalously working in a cigar factory. In the generations since, the women survive, outliving their men yet too often estranging their daughters. Back in the near-present, just for a few days, Jeanette becomes a maternal substitute for her disappeared neighbor Gloria's young child, Ana. Originally from El Salvador, Gloria and Ana's journey of multiple dislocations will find reverberating echoes in Jeanette's family history. Garcia's women populate a sprawling albeit textually spare narrative that demands careful parsing for resonant rewards.

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