04 Mar / Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia [in Booklist]
Gabriela Garcia turns her MFA thesis for Purdue University (where she studied with the revered Roxane Gay) into her widely buzzed first novel. Presented in 12 chapters that read more like interlinked stories, Garcia channels her Miami-based Cuban-Mexican American heritage into five generations of a Cuban American matriarchy.
Garcia opens with a two-page prologue set in 2018 in Miami, introducing Jeanette, who is recovering from drug addiction and desperate to reclaim her life while navigating a complicated relationship with her mother, Carmen. The first chapter then jumps back to 1866 in Camagüey, Cuba, to great-great-grandmother María Isabel, a hungry-for-more young woman anomalously working in a cigar factory. In the generations since, the women survive, outliving their men yet too often estranging their daughters.
Back in the near-present, just for a few days, Jeanette becomes a maternal substitute for her disappeared neighbor Gloria’s young child, Ana. Originally from El Salvador, Gloria and Ana’s journey of multiple dislocations will find reverberating echoes in Jeanette’s family history.
Garcia’s women populate a sprawling albeit textually spare narrative that demands careful parsing for resonant rewards.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, March 1, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021