Jun 13

Jun 13 Of Women and Salt

Author: Gabriela Garcia
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born

In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.

From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals--personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others--that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America's most tangled, honest, human roots.

TL;DR Review

Of Women and Salt was a gorgeous, unforgettable book, with a feeling somewhere between a novel and short stories. I’m so glad I read it.

For you if: You like character-driven novels by poets.

Full Review

“María Isabel thought it had always been women who wove the future out of the scraps, always the characters, never the authors. She knew a woman could learn to resent this post, but she would instead find a hundred books to read.”

I read Of Women and Salt as part of Roxane Gay’s Audacious book club via Literati, and it was so good, y’all. Seriously. From the very first chapter, I knew I was going to love it. Searing stories, sweeping history, sharp women who reach for you right out of the page. And prose that cuts like a knife. What else could you ask for?

The book is a novel, but it’s written in chapters that bounce around in time and between narrators, so it almost has a connected short story collection type of feeling to it. I don’t want to give too much away, but the characters are stretch back generations, from the family matriarch in Cuba in the 1800s to a young woman (Jeanette) struggling with addiction today.

It’s rich with history and multigenerational legacy, an homage to Latinx women throughout the past few centuries. I particularly loved the first chapter, about Maria Isabel in a cigar factory in the 1800s, and one close to the middle from the POV of Jeanette’s mother (IYKYK). Gabriela Garcia is also a poet, and it absolutely shows. Literary and moving and beautiful and painful all at once.

Plenty of content warnings on this one, but if you are OK with them, it’s so worth it. I may reread this one in the future. I definitely, definitely recommend.