Dreaming in Cuban is a novel about the bonds and differences (political, geographical, and personal) of three generations of women in the del Pino family. The novel is set against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution.
Reviews
“A work that possesses the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Though one is dazzled by the book’s small fireworks of imagery, though one stops to marvel at some of the fantastic events that bloom on its pages, the reader is never distracted from the gripping story of its extraordinary heroines and the passions that bind and separate them from one another and the country of their birth . . . [García] is blessed with a poet’s ear for language, a historian’s fascination with the past, and a musician’s intuitive understanding of the ebb and flow of emotion.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Dreaming in Cuban is beautifully written in language that is by turns languid and sensual, curt and surprising. Like Louise Erdrich, whose crystalline language is distilled of images new to our American literature but old to this land, Ms. García has distilled a new tongue from scraps salvaged from upheaval . . . It is [the] ordinary magic in García’s novel and her characters’ sense of their own lyricism that makes her work the latest sign that American literature has its own hybrid offspring of the Latin American school.”—Thulani Davis, The New York Times Book Review
“Impressive… Her story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny More.”—Time
“Remarkable… An intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic… Evocative and lush… A rich and haunting narrative, an excellent new voice in contemporary fiction.”—Jackie Jones, San Francisco Chronicle
“Poignant and perceptive… It tells of a family divided politically and geographically by the Cuban revolution… [and] of the generational fissures that open on each side: In Cuba, between a grandmother who is a fervent Castro supporter and a daughter who retreats into an Afro-Cuban santeria cult; in America, between another daughter, who mocks her obsession… The realism is exquisite.”—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times