Let it Rain Coffee
From the Women's Prize shortlisted author of Dominicana
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- €3.99
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- €3.99
Publisher Description
Esperanza risked her life fleeing the Dominican Republic for the glittering dream she saw on television but years later she is still stuck in a cramped tenement with her husband, Santo, and their two children, Bobby and Dallas. She works as a home help and, at night, hides unopened bills from the credit card company where Santo won't find them when he returns from driving his minicab. When Santo's mother dies and his father, Don Chan, comes to Nueva York to live out his twilight years with the Colóns, nothing will ever be the same. Don Chan remembers fighting together with Santo in the revolution against Trujillo's cruel regime, the promise of who his son might have been, had he not fallen under Esperanza's spell.
Let it Rain Coffee is a sweeping novel about love, loss, family, and the elusive nature of memory and desire.
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.
