A wealthy Cuban outsider confronts her daughter’s heroin use as well as her role in their pathetic self decisions. As the novel begins, it is 2018, and Carmen is trying to write to her daughter, Jeannette, in despair, pleading for her to regain the will to live. Then we’re whisked off to Camagüey, Cuba, in 1866, just before the start of the first Cuban independence war from Spain, where we encounter one of its women’s ancestors.
Mara Isabel operates at a cigar plant, and as the violence rages on, she is followed by the factory’s librettist, who reads papers and Victor Hugo’s narratives to the staff as they roll cigars. If the book had managed to have rich scenes like these, it may have been a triumph, but from here on out, it felt haphazardly pieced together.
We reach Jeannette in 2014, and then Carmen’s and Jeanette’s characters switch unpredictably over various periods, with no overlap between each other threads of the story focus on the worthless or even cruel men who ruin the futures of all the family’s women. After which, even though welded onto the novel, Garcia intersperses portions from the perspectives of a lady called Gloria and her daughter, Ana, all of whom are illegal migrants from El Salvador.
While Ana is at a nanny’s home, Gloria is grabbed by ICE officers, and when the girl is left alone, Jeanette holds her in for a few nights until Carmen tries to convince her to contact the police—a call that will come back to haunt Carmen. Though with snippets of exquisitely convincing writing, the book falls short due to a lack of intimacy growth among the family’s women in both Miami and Cuba. A Cuban family is dealing with addiction and depression, but their marriages are shallow.
