Review by Booklist Review
Cummins follows her feted and maligned American Dirt (2020) with a fine novel covering territory closer to the author's lived experience, featuring, as it does, three generations of women navigating their identities as Puerto Ricans (or not). It begins in Palisades, New York, in 2023 when Ruth, who runs a video business, receives a phone call in the middle of a shoot. The call delivers the news that her daughter, Daisy, has been hospitalized after being injured in a hurricane. From there, the story zigzags back and forth through time and place from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to St. Louis to New York. It also moves among the stories of Ruth, Daisy, and her grandmother Rafaela. While Ruth and Rafaela contend with love lost and found, classism, and racism in contentious times, Daisy's sections are the heart of the novel, dipping into magical realism as her spirit navigates the border between life and death and brings the family to her bedside with triumphant and transcendent love. This commendable return for Cummins comes with a surprise cherry-on-top twist.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The publisher is giving a big push to this new work by former Oprah Book Club author and solidly best-selling novelist Cummins.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cummins (American Dirt) serves up an engrossing if occasionally cloying family drama. In 2023 Palisades, N.Y., Ruth Hayes receives a phone call from a hospital in Puerto Rico. Her daughter, Daisy, who recently left college over Ruth's objections and moved to the island, has been hit by a car. From there, the narrative rewinds to San Juan in 1968, as Daisy's maternal grandmother, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón, prepares to marry her Irish American fiancé, Peter, despite his parents' misgivings. Later, when Peter moves his wife and two small kids back to his native Missouri, the cracks in their marriage deepen. Cummins devotes later sections to Ruth, both as a child in St. Louis watching her mother struggle and as an adult, mystified by her own three children. When her youngest, born Charlie Hayes, decides to change his name to Carlos Hayes-Acuña, Ruth feels "a tiny flare of anger... what right did Charlie have to try on as if it were a costume?" Despite some melodramatic moments and convoluted twists, Cummins succeeds at breathing life into her large cast of characters and excels at depicting the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship. This is worth a look. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Three generations navigate familial relationships and one big family secret. Rafaela grows up in a palatial house in San Juan, but when her father loses his powerful job in disgrace, she has to leave school and work as a secretary on a military base. When she and her husband move their family to Missouri, their daughter, Ruth, assimilates much more easily than her brother. Ruth's daughter, Daisy, rejects the upper-middle-class life her mother creates for her in a suburb half an hour away from Manhattan, choosing instead to manage her uncle's rental properties in Puerto Rico. This novel tells the stories of all three women, shifting in time from the 1950s to the present day. Cummins' previous novel,American Dirt(2020), was a bestseller, but some critics complained that the author seemed to be writing about Mexican migrants as an outsider looking in. Her depictions of Puerto Rican culture and the lives of her migrant characters here are occasionally more nuanced--colorism and class play significant roles in the plot--but Cummins still indulges in tired tropes. For example, Rafaela's mother is a black-haired beauty from the countryside who shimmies her hips and claps back at the patrician women who snub her. And the Puerto Rico that Daisy experiences never quite feels like an actual place. On her first visit to her grandmother's birthplace, Daisy falls in love with Puerto Rico because it's "just foreign enough to be an adventure and still familiar enough to feel like home." This would read less like the tagline on a travel brochure if the move from the American suburbs to San Juan had any discernible impact on her as a person. She does almost die in a hurricane, but a natural disaster is not character development. Indeed, none of the characters here emerge as real people. Even the dramatic revelation that animates the novel's final act fails to provoke much in the way of conflict or change. Flat characters and cultural cliches make for a disappointing read. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
