How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'One of my favorite books I have read in years' Quiara Alegria Hudes, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter of In the Heights
Write this down: Cara Romero wants to work.
Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of twelve sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her alternately biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification and loss, and, eventually, what really happened between her and her estranged son, Fernando. As Cara confronts her darkest secrets and regrets, we see a woman buffeted by life but still full of fight.
Structurally inventive and emotionally kaleidoscopic, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is Angie Cruz's most ambitious and moving novel yet, and Cara is a heroine for the ages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cruz (Dominicana) returns with a wry story of the Latinx community in New York City's gentrifying Washington Heights in the late 2000s. Cara Romero, a single woman in her 50s, is unexpectedly jobless after the factory where she worked shuts down. The state's Senior Workforce Program provides her with meager benefits in exchange for attending weekly meetings with a job counselor. During the sessions, Cara's monologues range widely, addressing her history of abuse, heartache, and affairs. She knows she has a tendency to get off topic ("When someone asks me about mangoes I talk about yuca," Cara tells the counselor). Cruz intersperses the sessions with Cara's questionnaires, job skill tests, and eviction notices, all underscoring the unjustness and absurdity of the economic shifts that have upended the lives of Cara and her neighbors. Cruz expertly avoids idealizing her indomitable protagonist into a flat victim, although not much of a plot emerges from the monologues—sometimes Cara just prattles on. However, readers who persist through the occasional narrative snag will be rewarded with a tender and quintessentially American portrait.
