Of Women and Salt
A Novel
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3.4 • 418 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
THE WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
WINNER of the Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Fiction Award - International Latino Book Awards • WINNER of
Best Literary Fiction - She Reads Best of 2021 Awards • FINALIST for the 2022 Southern Book Prize • LONGLISTED for Crook’s Corner Book Prize • NOMINEE for 2021 Goodreads Choice Award in Debut Novel and Historical Fiction
A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born
In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.
From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals—personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others—that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America’s most tangled, honest, human roots.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Gabriela Garcia’s masterful debut spans generations and oceans, and rests on the capable shoulders of the women—immigrants and exiles to the U.S. from El Salvador and Cuba—who inhabit its pages. Against various backdrops, from Havana’s vibrant streets to the soul-crushing purgatory of a Texas detention center, the novel’s heroines navigate personal and political crises. As they tackle everything from abuse to addiction to revolution, they must make impossible choices for themselves and their children. Of Women and Salt is an electric exploration of what binds and divides mothers and daughters, as well as new immigrants and the next generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Garcia's dexterous debut chronicles the travails of a Cuban immigrant family. Carmen, a Cuban immigrant living in Miami, is worried about her daughter Jeanette's addiction to drugs and alcohol. In 2014, during a moment of sobriety, Jeanette watches as her Salvadorian neighbor, Gloria, is detained by ICE while Gloria's daughter, Ana, is away with a babysitter. After Jeanette takes in Ana, Garcia unfolds the stories of the two families in parallel narratives, shifting between Gloria awaiting deportation in a Texas detention center while Ana stays briefly with Jeanette and episodes set during the Cuban Independence Movement of the late 19th century, when Jeanette's great-great-grandmother worked in Cuba at a cigar factory, and Carmen's escape from Cuba 15 years after the revolution. Eventually, Jeanette's story reveals her addiction may be her way of coping with the trauma of having been sexually assaulted as child. Throughout, Garcia illustrates the hard choices mothers make generation after generation to protect their children: "Motherhood: question mark, a constant calculation of what-if," muses Gloria. The jumps across time and place can occasionally dampen the various threads' emotional impact, but by the end they form an impressive, tightly braided whole. This riveting account will please readers of sweeping multigenerational stories. Agents: PJ Mark and Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.
Customer Reviews
Eh.
All those individual stories but she didn’t go into depth about how their individual stories affected the family altogether. Lacked cohesion.
Good stories, poor flow.
I would get caught up in a story line and she would switch to another and not circle back. It felt like short stories, not a novel. No follow through with the characters and awkward flow.
Wonderful read!!!
Excellent writing. Story gripped me from the beginning and wouldn’t let go.