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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. An affluent Cuban immigrant reckons with her daughter’s drug addiction and her own culpability in their self-destructive choices.Īs the book opens, it's 2018, and Carmen is writing in anguish to her daughter, Jeannette, begging her to find the will to live.
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