Publishers Weekly
02/22/2021
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. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Named a Best Book of the Year:
Cosmopolitan • The Boston Globe • Real Simple • Marie Claire • Reader’s Digest • Good Housekeeping • Woman’s Day • She Reads • Austin Public Library • Harper’s Bazaar
Roxane Gay's June 2021 Audacious Book Club Pick
A Most Anticipated Book of 2021 (Books Are Magic, Bustle, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, Entertainment Weekly, Goodreads, Harper's Bazaar, O Magazine, Lit Hub, Write or Die Tribe, Palm Beach Daily, and more!)
“Gabriela Garcia captures the lives of Cuban women in a world to which they refuse to surrender and she does so with precision and generosity and beauty.” — Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist
"Of Women and Salt is a fierce and powerful debut. Garcia wields narrative power, cultivating true and profound work on migration, legacy, and survival." — Terese Marie Mailhot, bestselling author of Heart Berries
"Garcia’s vivid details, visceral prose and strong willful women negotiating how to survive in this world are easy to fall for." — Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana
“[A] beautifully evocative first novel.” — The New York Times Book Review
"This riveting account will please readers of sweeping multigenerational stories." — Publishers Weekly
“I love the way Garcia is able to combine trauma and lyricism, briars and roses, in the lives of the complex, passionate women at the center of this beautiful debut.” — Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
“Of Women and Salt reads like poetry.” — Vogue
“Highly anticipated.” — Elle
“A mesmerizing patchwork of determination, courage, and survival.” — The Washington Post
"From the perspectives of several generations of Cuban women, this remarkable debut shines a brilliant light on the broken immigration system and legacy of trauma for the people who endure it." — Ms. Magazine
“Following three generations of Cuban women from Mexico to Miami, Gabriela Garcia’s debut novel promises to be a sweeping tour de force about addiction, displacement, and the legacy of trauma." — Harper's Bazaar
"Phenomenal . . . readers won’t want to put [it] down." — BUST
"This gripping, accomplished debut follows generations of Cuban women, from María Isabel, rolling cigars as she listens to the words of Victor Hugo and men die around her, to Jeanette, struggling with addiction in Miami, and trying to find a place in the world that feels real." — Lit Hub
"The debut that's had publishing buzzing all winter long meditates on the way immigration shapes the lives of Latinx women." — Entertainment Weekly
"I love a sweeping, ambitious debut, and this novel about a woman’s family, with examinations of contemporary immigration and trauma and motherhood, sounds just incredible." — Emma Straub,
New York Times bestselling author of The Vacationers and All Adults Here
Library Journal
02/01/2021
DEBUT Garcia's debut novel tells two parallel stories of Latinx immigrant families. While the stories intersect near the beginning and end of the book, the women's experiences are as distinct as the cultures from which they come. At the story's center is Jeanette, whose mother, Carmen, emigrated from Cuba, cutting off all ties with her family. The family is impacted by multigenerational trauma caused by war, revolution, and abuse, and Jeanette struggles with drug addiction. When her neighbor, Gloria, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, is detained by ICE, Jeanette briefly takes in her daughter, Ana, who is inadvertently left behind. In nonsequential chapters, we follow the struggles of Jeanette and her family, as well as Gloria and Ana's harrowing experiences with the current U.S. immigration policies. VERDICT While the nonlinear structure of the narrative sometimes makes the story feel disjointed, Garcia has carefully layered the novel so that each chapter delivers revelations about the motivations and psychological burdens of the characters that add to understanding on the part of the reader (though not necessarily the characters, who are not always party to the secrets of their mothers or grandmothers). A relevant and timely work delivered with empathy.—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Kirkus Reviews
2020-12-26
An affluent Cuban immigrant reckons with her daughter’s drug addiction and her own culpability in their self-destructive choices.
As the book opens, it's 2018, and Carmen is writing in anguish to her daughter, Jeannette, begging her to find the will to live. Then we're immediately swept away to Camagüey, Cuba, in 1866, right before the first Cuban war for independence from Spain, where we meet one of the women's ancestors. María Isabel works at a cigar factory, and, as the war blooms bright and bloody, she's pursued by the factory’s lector, who reads newspapers and Victor Hugo novels to the workers as they roll cigars. If the novel had continued to offer rich scenes like these, it would have been a success, but from this point on, it feels haphazardly stitched together. We meet Jeannette in 2014, and then Carmen's and Jeanette’s voices alternate erratically through different time periods, with little resonance between them—both strands of the narrative center the useless or even abusive men who litter the lives of all the family’s women. Then, as if grafted onto the story, Garcia adds intermittent sections from the points of view of a woman named Gloria and her daughter, Ana, undocumented immigrants from El Salvador. Gloria is picked up by ICE agents while Ana is at a babysitter's house, and when the girl gets dropped off, Jeanette takes her in for a few nights before Carmen convinces her to call the police—a decision that will come to haunt Carmen. Even with snatches of gorgeously compelling prose, the book can't overcome the lack of relationship development among the women of the family in both Miami and Cuba.
A Cuban family grapples with violence and addiction, but their relationships lack depth.
