Of Women and Salt is a beautifully written book by Gabriela Garcia. This novel explores 5 generations of women, their relationships and the trauma they share.

Main focus of the story is Jeanette, daughter of Cuban immigrants, who is battling addiction and the results of childhood abuse. Jeanette witnesses Gloria, a neighbour, being taken by ICE, and she opens her home to Gloria’s young daughter, Ana. Throughout the novel, parallel to Jeanette’s family history, we also find out what happens to Ana and her mother, and the horrors of the family immigration detention centers.
Throughout the novel, we then get to know Jeanette’s mother, Carmen, and her Grandmother, Dolores, witnessing how their past formed them, and ultimately understanding why the shared matrilineal trauma shaped who they are.
The book also briefly touches on racism in Cuba, and how Cubans are perceived in the US, as opposed to other Central and Southern American people.

To say I enjoyed this novel would be a lie: it was painful to read, and really, really sad. I also felt that some of the marginal characters felt a bit flat, but overall it was incredibly well written and evocative.

Five generations of women, back and forth in time, between Miami, Cuba and Mexico.
Courage, pain, addiction, deportation and more in this evocative and thought provoking novel.

The book tells the story of different generations of women...started in Cuba in the 1800’s. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the women. It’s a story of live, violence, addiction, immigration, family.
I sometimes found the story hard to follow but generally I enjoyed this book. I have given it 3 stars but I feel like I might go back to it at some point and that will increase

An absolutely beautiful book; deeply engrossing, richly poetic, and an education about the lives of women and families over time. I picked this book up after reading positive review after positive review, and I was hooked from the first page. The atmosphere the author creates in the cigar workhouses, as well as the depth of the characters within -- their passion for books and for each other -- sets a tremendous scene. We then shift between pasts and futures, and we learn of the fates not only of the people in the cigar factory, but also of the books they read, hear, and love. The years bring joy and pain, sacrifice and sorrow, love and loss. The systems that barricade these women, and the histories they navigate, drawn frustration and sadness. But the author provides hope, forgiveness, and roads forward. I loved this book, and I can't wait to see it win all the awards this year..

a unique read. It's one story but a series of vignettes too to make a whole which is an interesting but very effective way of telling this story. The women in this book are representative of women all over the world and this is their story, this is a representation of their voices. IT's about migration, women, women's rights and so much more. It's hard to describe but a pleasure to read.

“I don’t know why I am here and I am alone and I am praying to a god I’m not sure exists but if she exists she is surely a bird, surely a migrating bird doing battle, surely she will break these walls.”

Of Women And Salt tells the story of several generations of women from a family in Cuba and Miami. In addition, another storyline comes together, of a mother & daughter who migrated to Miami from El Salvador and is then deported to Mexico. All of these women deal with issues such as immigration, domestic, loss and addiction. Each of them wonders "what if..” What if they had made a different decision? Could they have foreseen the impact their decisions would have on the next generation?

“I made a choice again, for you. And I am sorry I had nothing else to offer, Ana. That there are no real rules that govern why some are born in turmoil and others never know a single day in which the next seems an ill-considered bet. It’s all lottery, Ana, all chance. It’s the flick of a coin, and we are born.”

This novel is beautifully written. Garcia gives each woman her own voice and so it almost feels like you are reading a collection of short stories. Very impressive.

Good read about mothers and daughters, finding your cultural history and the past, forming relationships and caring for one another. The historical context of the story from the Cuban factories to ICE adds depth to the story of five women in Cuba, US and Mexico. A good debut
(Will be featured in a short list on Vogue India March 2021 issue)

A thought-provoking story of mothers and daughters through the generations. The book covers the period from 1866 in Cuba to modern day Miami. Over the course of the novel we piece together the lives of the women, discovering the poverty, abuse and fear they live through. At times bleak, the novel does offer hope at the end with an uplifting message.
I found this a very interesting, emotionally powerful read. Everything came together at the end but I did find it rather disjointed at first.

Where to begin with this book? It absolutely captivated me, drawing me into the lives of several characters, some bound by blood, all bound by their lived experiences as women. The sole female worker in a 19th century Cuban cigar factory, the wife and mother abused by her husband who fights for Fidel Castro, the drug addict, the 'illegal' immigrant and her daughter, the mother trying to protect, failing. A rich, flawed cast of characters set against multiple backdrops and timelines. We are force.

The writing at times is smooth and absorbing, like the gentle lapping of the sea upon the shore; other times it is brutal, a tornado smashing into a glass house, shattering prejudices and perceptions and leaving a mess in its wake. My only criticism is that I wanted, needed, more.

Of Women and Salt is a novel about choices, immigration, and motherhood that moves from 19th century Cuba to 21st century Miami. In 1866 in Cuba, Maria Isabel is the only woman working at the cigar factory, but war is coming. And in Miami in 2016, Carmen, a first generation Cuban immigrant, is trying to get her daughter Jeannette to stay sober, whilst Jeanette wants to go to Cuba to understand the past her mother doesn't talk about. And a few years previous, a chance act by Jeanette affects the life of Ana, a young girl who lives across the street with her mother who is about to be deported back to El Salvador.

Told in episodes that move between points of view, time, and place, this is a rich novel that looks at different immigrant circumstances (particularly at the experience of Cubans coming to America and then people from Central American countries like Mexico and El Salvador) and how choices impact people's lives. It is woven together well, with Carmen and Jeanette's strained relationship taking an important place in the novel, especially around the reasons behind each of their perspectives and what they've faced and the difficulty they have in telling the truth to each other. Through Jeanette, the novel looks at drug addiction and the opioid crisis in Florida, and also at how she longs for Cuba though she's never been, and doesn't find it quite what she expects.

The other narratives in the novel bring in other elements, from a contemporary tale of detention centres and the difficulties of making it to the US and staying there to moments from 1866 and 1959 in Cuba which show political moments through the eyes of individual women who have to fight to survive on a more personal scale. The different stories are brought together cleverly to give an overall picture of women battling for themselves and their families and how their individual struggles reflect wider political and social events.

Of Women and Salt is a vivid and powerful novel that grips you as it shows you major moments in its protagonists' lives. The focus on these individuals and their place in the wider world made it easier for me to keep up with than some other multi-generational novels and I found myself reading it more quickly than I expected.

Starting in a 19th century Cuban cigar factory, Of Women and Salt follows the women of one family, jumping back and forth through generations and skipping through time as more of their stories unfold across countries, detention centres, and (literal) revolutions. Jeanette is just out of rehab and trying to understand her family's past in Cuba; something her mother Carmen refuses to talk about, so Jeanette has become friends with her cousin in Havana. Seeing her Salvadorean neighbour picked up by ICE, Jeanette takes in the daughter who has been left behind, adding another voice to the story.

Gabriela Garcia weaves all of these women's stories together expertly - considering that the novel is only 200 pages long, all six of Garcia's narrators feel fully fleshed out, and I was completely invested in them. I think if you like intergenerational stories like Homegoing, you'd like this!

✨ thanks to @picadorbooks & #netgalley for the proof!

Great debut! This interesting novel takes you from Cuba to Mexico to modern-day Miami. Jeanette's story felt so very relevant. I thought it was really well done so much heart in a short book.

Powerful, beautiful, heart-warming; Garcia's "Of women and salt" deals with 5 generations of women in Cuba, Mexico and Miami and delves into important topics such as womanhood, family ties, migration, heritage.

"She knew and, despite the weight of it, accepted her role as liberator of a frightened man. 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."

In 1870 Victor Hugo replied to a letter from the Cuban exile Emilia Casanova de Villaverde – wife of the novelist Cirilo (author of the novella Cecilia Valdés) with a letter addressed to the women of Cuba – a country then struggling to free itself from Spanish domination – writing of exile and of occupation

“Women of Cuba, I hear your cries. Fugitives, martyrs, widows, orphans, you turn to an outlaw; those who have no home to call their own seek the support of one who has lost his country. Certainly we are overwhelmed; you no longer have your voice, and I have more than my own: your voice moaning, mine warning. These two breaths, sobbing for home, calling for home, are all that remain. Who are we, weakness? No, we are force.’”

These last words – handwritten in a first edition of “Les Misérables” – form the thread which holds together this novel – which despite its brief length – roams across 6 point of view narrators, 5 generations and 4 countries.

The author, who grew up in the Miami Latinx community and is the daughter of Mexican and Cuban immigrants has said “I had the ambitious idea of combining all these different threads I was obsessed with: Cuba, America, detention, deportation, addiction, privilege” using the voices of women – an idea she explored in her MFA Thesis which was the genesis of this book – an exploration of all of those ideas, of the mother daughter relationship, and of divides across colour, social class, country and generations.

The book begins briefly in 2018, with a short cry of despair from Carmen (a wealthy, first generation immigrant from Cuba living in Miami) to her estranged, addict daughter Jeanette – pleading with Jeanette to turn from her destructive drug addiction and prove that she wants to live, so that Carmen can begin to bridge the divides between them: a divide which built up due after the death of Jeanette’s father when she shocked Carmen (who had tolerated his alcoholism due to the prosperity she married into) with the truth of his behaviour; and which was exacerbated by Jeanette’s assumptions about the reason why Carmen cut off all links with her mother (Jeannette’s grandmother) Dolores who still lives in Cuba.

The first full chapter plunges us back to Cuba in 1866 (a time of increasing guerilla activity) and the family matriarch (Dolores’s grandmother) María Isabel – the only female cigar roller in a factory. María Isabel is inspired and then courted by the factory lector who gifts her first Cecilia Valdés (which “spoke of the Spanish and creole social elite, love between free and enslaved Black Cubans; a mulatto woman, her place in their island’s history. Even so, the author creole, an influential man”) and then Les Misérables – both of which he reads in the factory alongside the daily newspapers (along with Hugo’s letter to de Villaverde) before authoritarian intervention costs him his job and drives him into subversive activities.

We then switch to Miami in 2014 – the newly recovering Jeanette (although still drawn to her abusive boyfriend and fellow addict Mario) sees her Central American neighbour taken away by ICE agents and impulsively takes in her abandoned daughter Ana, to the strong disapproval of Carmen who tries to convince her she is imperiling her parole.

We then join Ana’s mother Gloria – an illegal immigrant from El Salvador (having fled M13 gang violence – readers of Valeria Luiselli’s brilliant “Tell Me How it Ends” will immediately identify with the brief references to decades of American complicity in creating their own refugee crisis as well as in the strong and deserved critiques of the Obama regime’s warped immigration policies) – in a detention centre without Ana.

Later point of view narrators (both first and third party, both past and present tense) are Carmen, Ana and Delores.

One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the author’s ability to write in so many different styles and voices – the book effectively has the form of a series of stand-alone and striking short stories coalescing around two related families as well as the themes mentioned earlier in my review .

The María Isabel chapter has a portentous and old-fashioned tone; the first Carmen chapter (titled “The Encyclopedia of Birds") features a brilliant set of avian facts and analogies for the character’s situation.

Later we have: a young adult tale of lost virginity mixed with the discovery of the body of an illegal immigrant; a two-girl road trip into the Cuban countryside followed by an awkward family reunion that causes them to examine their assumptions and prejudices; a prosperous tale of a thanksgiving dinner gone wrong – and a microcosm of the tensions and preoccupations of the older Cuban Castro-refugee community in Miami, mixed with an animal mystery; an account by the abused wife of a Castro freedom fighter; the observations of a girl working on a beauty counter in a department store and her deductions of a wealthy couple who shop with her; a childhood story of growing up as a Salvadorian house maid with an American ex-pat in Mexico; an American Dirt style border crossing - before the two families are drawn back together.

I was drawn to this book due to the number of 2021 preview literary fiction features in which it has appeared – and having read it, suspect it will feature in many best of 2021 lists in a year’s time as well as some prize lists during the year – albeit the publishing date (of mid-April) means it will not be eligible for this year’s Women’s Prize (for which this would seem a certainty to make at least the longlist)

"In the margin of one page, .. was Jeanette’s handwriting below another note in faded script that seemed to spell out the same thing. We are force, the scribble read. And then Jeanette had added her own words, We are more than we think we are. And though [she] had no idea why Jeanette had written those words, she chose to believe the sentence, the scribble, was a cry across time. Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. …. She had no idea what else life would ask of her, force out of her …. She thought that she, too, might give away the book someday, though she had no idea to whom. Someone who reminded her of herself maybe. Someone who liked stories. She said thank you and put the book aside."

Ultimately this is a brilliant book for those who like stories. And as I put the book aside I say thank you to the author and thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley.

This is almost five short stories which come together at the end of the book. It is the lives, loves, and tribulations of five women from the US, Cuba and Mexico.

The prose is engaging, and the female characters try their best in the circumstances that fate has dealt them. It is a fascinating look into the ongoing US migration issues.

I am hugely impressed that this a debut novel - the 'force' is very much with Gabriela Garcia.