Let It Rain Coffee
A Novel
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- 17,99 €
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- 17,99 €
Descripción editorial
With her first novel, Angie Cruz established herself as a dazzling new voice in Latin-American fiction. Junot Diaz called her "a revelation" and The Boston Globe compared her writing to that of Gabriel García Márquez. Now, with humor, passion, and intensity, she reveals the proud members of the Colón family and the dreams, love, and heartbreak that bind them to their past and the future.
Esperanza did not risk her life fleeing the Dominican Republic to live in a tenement in Washington Heights. No, she left for the glittering dream she saw on television: JR, Bobby Ewing, and the crystal chandeliers of Dallas. But years later, she is still stuck in a cramped apartment with her husband, Santo, and their two children, Bobby and Dallas. She works as a home aide and, at night, stuffs unopened bills from the credit card company in her lingerie drawer where Santo won't find them when he returns from driving his livery cab. Despite their best efforts, they cannot seem to change their present circumstances.
But when Santo's mother dies, back in Los Llanos, and his father, Don Chan, comes to Nueva York to live out his twilight years in the Colóns' small apartment, nothing will ever be the same. Santo had so much promise before he fell for that maldita woman, thinks Don Chan, especially when he is left alone with his memories of the revolution they once fought together against Trujillo's cruel regime, the promise of who Santo might have been, had he not fallen under Esperanza's spell. From the moment Don Chan arrives, the tension in the Colón household is palpable.
Flashing between past and present, Let It Rain Coffee is a sweeping novel about love, loss, family, and the elusive nature of memory and desire, set amid the crosscurrents of the history and culture that shape our past and govern our future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An immigrant family is tested by a series of problems in this unsentimental American dream story by Cruz (Soledad). Heavily influenced by American television, Esperanza Col n finally has enough money in her secret savings to flee the Dominican Republic for New York, where she is joined eventually by her husband, Santo, and their two children, Bobby and Dallas. Ten years after they arrive, Santo's widowed father, Don Chan, joins the crowded household. Don Chan was always disappointed that his son married the daughter of supporters of the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo; he preferred Miraluz Natera, whose passion for change after Trujillo's assassination equaled his own, and in New York Don Chan is seized by nostalgia for his political past in the Dominican Republic. When Santo is murdered in his cab, things begin to go downhill for the family: Don Chan loses his grip on the present; Dallas, with her neighborhood friend Hush, navigates the tricky waters of adolescence; Bobby inadvertently becomes involved in a shooting and is sent to a juvenile detention facility. When yet another tragedy occurs, they all return to the island, and each family member finds some measure of peace. Without a familiarity with Dominican Republic political history and a smattering of Spanish, the events of the novel can be hard to follow; but Cruz's unvarnished, sympathetic account of immigrant struggles suggests she is a writer worth watching.
