America's Dream
Novel, A
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4.0 • 21 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Lyrical [and] haunting, América’s liberating epiphany will have readers . . . on their feet and cheering." — Washington Post
From the award-winning, best-selling author of When I Was Puerto Rican, América’s Dream explores the ever-shifting definition of what it means to be American and exemplifies the spirit of every immigrant who has dared to realize the American dream.
América Gonzalez is a hotel housekeeper on Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, cleaning up after wealthy foreigners who don’t look her in the eye. Her alcoholic mother resents her; her married boyfriend, Correa, beats her; and their fourteen-year-old daughter thinks life would be better anywhere but with América. So when América is offered the chance to work as a live-in housekeeper and nanny for a family in Westchester, New York, she takes it as a sign to finally make the escape she's been longing for.
Yet, even as América revels in the comparative luxury of her new life—daring to care about a man other than Correa—she is faced with the disquieting realization that no matter what she does, she can never really escape her past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Santiago, author of the memoir When I Was Puerto Rican, establishes herself as a strong and irresistible new voice in fiction with this story of a Puerto Rican woman who comes to America and discovers herself. America Gonzales, 30, cleans hotel rooms on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Her 14-year-old daughter, Rosalinda, has run away with a boyfriend, and America grieves that her daughter has not learned from her mistakes. America is, and has always been, Correa's woman, even though Correa has a wife and family a ferry ride away. Correa, the walking embodiment of blind, brutish machismo, comes to see America whenever he likes, sleeps in her bed and-as often as not-beats her. But an escape presents itself when the Leveretts, a young American couple whose kids America babysat when they stayed at the hotel, call from their Westchester home and ask her to be a nanny to their two young children. Her new life in suburbia and a tentative new love are overshadowed by the growing terror and certainty of a final reckoning with Correa. Lush descriptions of the sights, smells and sounds of the island pervade the early chapters; later, America's take on Westchester and her cousins in the Bronx is full of deliciously keen observations. As she charts America's emerging sense of self, Santiago shows us America's-and America's-life with wry insight. With its seamless construction, saucy dialect and clear prose, this novel is involving and immediate, truthful and tender. Major ad/promo; author tour; U.K. and translation rights: Aaron Priest agency; first serial and dramatic rights: Molly Friedrich.
