Talk to me about home
Rafael grew up in a palace home in San Juan, but when her father loses her powerful work in shame, she must leave school and work as a secretary at a military base. When she and her husband move their family to Missouri, their daughter Ruth assimilates much easier than their brother. Ruth’s daughter, Daisy, rejects the life of the upper middle class her mother creates for her in a half -hour suburb of Manhattan, instead choosing to manage her uncle’s property in Puerto Rico. This novel tells the stories of all three women who are shifting in the time from the 1950s to the present day. Cummins’ previous novel, American dirt (2020), it was a bestseller, but some critics complained that the author seemed to write about Mexican migrants as an outsider watching. Her images of the Puerto Rican culture and the life of her migrant characters here are more nuns – alorism and class play significant roles in the story – but Kumins still indulges in tired tropes. For example, Rafael’s mother is black hair from the province that shines her hips and clapped back to the Patrician women who stab her. And Puerto Rico, which Daisy is experiencing, never feels like a real place. On his first visit to her grandmother’s birthplace, Daisy falls in love with Puerto Rico because he is “foreign enough to be an adventure and still know enough to feel at home.” This would read less like the tumor of a travel brochure if the transition from the US suburbs to San Juan had some noticeable impact on her as a person. She almost dies with a hurricane, but the natural disaster is not a development of character. In fact, none of the characters here is like real people. Even the dramatic revelation, which revives the final act of the novel, fails to provoke much on the path of conflict or change.
