Calibre library
Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Coming of Age, Hispanic & Latino, Contemporary Women, Lang:en
Summary
A
New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, winner of
the International Latino Book Award for Best Latino-themed
Fiction 2016,
Longlisted for the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel
Prize.
Named a best book of the season by Cosmopolitan,
Vanity Fair,
Harper's Bazaar,
Redbook,
Bustle,
NBC Latino and *Men's Journal
*
The arresting debut novel from award-winning writer
Jennine Capó Crucet
****When Lizet-the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the
first in her family to graduate from high school-secretly
applies and is accepted to an ultra-elite college, her parents
are furious at her decision to leave Miami. Just weeks before
she's set to start school, her parents divorce and her father
sells her childhood home, leaving Lizet, her mother, and
Leidy-Lizet's older sister, a brand-new single mom-without a
steady income and scrambling for a place to live. Amidst this turmoil, Lizet begins her first semester at
Rawlings College, distracted by both the exciting and difficult
moments of freshman year. But the privileged world of the
campus feels utterly foreign, as does her new awareness of
herself as a minority. Struggling both socially and
academically, she returns to Miami for a surprise Thanksgiving
visit, only to be overshadowed by the arrival of Ariel
Hernandez, a young boy whose mother died fleeing with him from
Cuba on a raft. The ensuing immigration battle puts Miami in a
glaring spotlight, captivating the nation and entangling
Lizet's entire family, especially her mother. Pulled between life at college and the needs of those she
loves, Lizet is faced with difficult decisions that will change
her life forever. Urgent and mordantly funny,
Make Your Home Among Strangers tells the moving story
of a young woman torn between generational, cultural, and
political forces; it's the new story of what it means to be
American today. **
An Amazon Best Book of August 2015: What is a
family? How do we define home? These are the questions Jennine
Capó Crucet addresses in her first novel after the
prizewinning collection,
How to Leave Hialeah. The daughter of Cuban immigrants
in Miami, Lizet Ramirez is the first member of her family to
graduate high school – and surely the first to have
gotten admitted to a tony private college up north. Wise but
naïve, ambitious but clueless, Lizet knows she wants to
escape the world of misery in Little Havana – her teenage
sister has just become a single mother; her passionate parents
have finally split apart – but she doesn’t quite
fit in at the mostly white and upper middle class place
she’s going, either. (One of my favorite scenes involved
a literature professor assuming that because she was of Latin
American descent, freshman Lizet understood everything about
the literary tradition known as Magical Realism.) Returning
home for a surprise visit on Thanksgiving, she’s greeted
by the news about the (real life) five-year-old Cuban boy,
Ariel Hernandez, whose mother had died trying to bring him to
the states; Hernandez became a cause celeb nationwide,
particularly in Florida, and here in the novel as well,
especially with Lizet’s lonely mother. Interspersing the
two stories, Crucet shows us how two children, separated, for
different reasons, from their families, are more alike than
not. And how, like all of us, they eventually have to come to
terms with their identities. *– Sara Nelson * In this beautifully written and compulsively readable
coming-of-age novel, Lizet is the daughter of Cuban immigrants
and the first in her family to attend college—and it's
not Miami-Dade Community College, either; it's Rawlings
College, an elite liberal arts school in upstate New York,
where Lizet has received a full scholarship. While Lizet is
away from home, experiencing snow for the first time and
finding out just how poorly Hialeah Lakes High School prepared
her for higher education, her family and boyfriend Omar
continue their lives in Miami and don't understand what Lizet
is doing. It's 1999, and Lizet's mother is caught up in the
case of five-year-old Cuban refugee Ariel Hernandez (a
fictionalized but essentially accurate version of the
Elián González case), which serves as a mirror for
Lizet's own situation of being torn between two cultures.
Lizet's trips home at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter
reveal the growing distance between where she came from and
where she wants to go. VERDICT Capó Crucet has created an
utterly believable character in Lizet, whose struggles with
family, studies, friendships, culture, identity, and the nature
of home will resonate with older teens who are preparing to
leave their own childhood homes.—Sarah Flowers, formerly
of Santa Clara County (CA) Library
Amazon.com Review
From School Library Journal