The past few months have been a bit of a crazy, chaotic whirlwind for me and while I’ve continued to do tons of reading, I’ve unfortunately been less diligent with the review side of things (mostly due to lack of time) – which is why I’m grateful to have a couple weeks off now and in December so I can finally catch up, both on the backlogged reviews that I didn’t get a chance to write as well as on the teetering stack of books that I have not gotten around to reading yet (the stack is literally inches away, right next to my keyboard, threatening to topple over as I type this).
One of the books I finished earlier in the month is Cuban American author Cristina Garcia’s debut novel Dreaming in Cuban, which came out back in 1992. I picked this one up because it was assigned reading for one of my classes, which of course made me skeptical about whether this would be a tedious read and whether I would actually enjoy it.
The story revolves around three generations of the del Pino family and the devastating impact that the Cuban revolution has on them. The narrative alternates between the perspectives of Celia (the matriarch of the del Pino family who still lives in Cuba), Lourdes (one of Celia’s three children who flees with her husband to the U.S. at the height of the Cuban revolution), and Pilar (Lourdes’s daughter who is caught between two the American world she lives in and the Cuban world of her heritage). In addition to the interesting format that the story is told in (a combination of third person, first person, and epistolary), there are also magical realism elements sprinkled throughout the narrative, though not in a heavy-handed manner (which I was glad to see because magical realism can be a hit or miss for me).
This is one of those novels that has a complex plot involving multiple characters (I’m grateful for the character chart that Garcia includes at the beginning of the book) with a deeply profound underlying message that takes a little bit of patience to get to.
Overall, I wouldn’t say that I “enjoyed” the book, as there was a lot of hard stuff in this one that had to be parsed through, but I definitely liked and appreciated it, especially for the unique insight it provided into the Cuban American experience. I would say that if this is a perspective that interests you, this one is well worth picking up, though be aware that trigger warnings abound.
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