Speak to Me of Home
Mostly entrancing ... The various timelines can be confusing at times, necessitating doubling back to reread. Those shifts also limit how thoroughly we get to know the main characters and their supporting casts. It’s only in the novel’s final third, when strands converge, that we become emotionally invested in the plights of these protagonists ...
There is a radiance to this saga, as vivid as the scenes set in a sumptuous San Juan ... Especially in this anti-immigrant era, the empathy with which Cummins envisions her characters is a poignant reminder that it is actual human beings who approach our borders, each with a singular story to tell.
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As a novel, Speak to Me of Home didn’t make much of an impression on me. It belongs to a genre of commercial women’s fiction that generally leaves me cold. But as a riposte, skillfully mounted while at the same time well shielded from the counterattacks typical of its targets, this book earned my respect ... There’s a tepid mystery set up at the beginning of the book, but nothing to compare to the breathless, thrillerlike, what-would-you-do? plotting of American Dirt. Whether Speak to Me of Home will replicate the success of its predecessor seems uncertain, but it does wrestle, if obliquely, with American Dirt’s critics ... For all its bland conventionality as a piece of storytelling, Speak to Me of Home sneakily amounts to a well-argued case that Cummins herself is not merely a clueless white woman ... As dignified and graceful a follow-up as anyone could have executed, one that acquiesces to the identity obsessions of her critics by staying in her own ethnic lane, while at the same time reflecting back to them what Cummins experienced as their lack of charity and imagination.
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Evocative, poetic passages about characters falling in love and the close bond between parents and children ... The novel views Puerto Rican culture from a distance, disconnected from the archipelago’s colonial history and lacking the nuance of lived experience ... I simply couldn’t extend poetic license to the author’s sloppiness with detail, about Puerto Rico and otherwise—which, however petty, was enough to take me out of the story ... The verisimilitude of Cummins’s present-day Puerto Rico is superficial at best, and references—to alfajores, Yaucono coffee, pasteles and alcapurrias—seem to be plucked from Wikipedia to add authenticity.
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