I found myself wishing for the same depth in the sections about Ana and her mother, Gloria. The depiction of the women in Jeanette and Carmen’s family is confident and layered, capturing their decencies and failings.
Instead, Garcia has the wisdom to let the books illuminate what can’t be recovered, no matter what can be inherited. A lesser writer might have used the books’ symbolic weight to try to close some of the historical gaps or heal familial wounds. The connections that survive do so in compelling ways. The chapters are sufficiently self-contained that the novel has the rhythm of a linked story collection, a structure that effectively emphasizes the disconnections and breaks that have shaped these characters. This book is shaped, and given buoyancy, by Garcia’s sharp prose and by Jeanette’s ability to continue believing that the unexpected is possible, even as it repeatedly fails to materialize. a haunting set of intertwined stories about migration that are meditations on the choices mothers make with their best intentions in mind, and the disastrous effects those choices can have. unprocessed trauma rests in the novel’s dark heart like a tumor. However, every page is full of writing that illuminates the depth of each character’s suffering in unforgettable ways. This honesty makes Of Women and Salt a hard, uncomfortable read because there are broken ribs, murder, lost teeth, hunger, and abuse here, all presented in real, heartbreaking passages. Garcia’s clean, straightforward prose cuts like a scalpel to expose the pain of leaving home and the trauma-both physical and emotional-that shatters the women in her book.
At once a multigenerational saga about Cuban women learning to survive after losing everything and a brutally honest look at the immigration system in the United States through the eyes of a Salvadoran mother and daughter deported to Mexico after building a life in Miami, this novel captures the beauty of refusing to surrender.
0 kommentar(er)
