Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia
Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia
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Dreaming in Cuban

Author: Cristina García

Narrator: Frankie Corzo, Marisa Blake, Anthony Lee Medina, Angel Harper

Unabridged: 8 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/30/2021


Synopsis

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] 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 Moré.”—Time
 
Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author.

Praise for Dreaming in Cuban

“Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post
 
“Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

About Cristina Garcia

Cristina Garcia is the editor of two anthologies and the author of seven novels, including The Aguero Sisters, King of Cuba, and the National Book Award finalist Dreaming in Cuban. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages, and she has been the recipient of several awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Guggenheim. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and has served as a faculty member at several universities.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Clif on April 04, 2013

True to the title, this book is definitely Cuban and dreamy. The story follows three generations of Cuban women, jumping forward and backward in time, hopping back and forth between Cuba and New York, and switching between a variety of narrative styles (i.e. third person, first person, and epistolar......more

Goodreads review by Claire on January 13, 2016

Set against the background of the Cuban Revolution, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban is a story that spans three generations of women in the del Pino/Almeida family, highlighting the things that tie them together and those which push them apart. The book opens with a vision of a man walking across......more

Goodreads review by Natalia on June 28, 2018

In interviews I'm often asked what books shaped me the most, so I've decided to start a shelf where I write about the books that left an impact early in life. Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia is the first that came to mind. I was in high school when I first heard of it, a freshman in English clas......more

Goodreads review by Bkwmlee on November 28, 2024

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 c......more


Quotes

“Dazzling . . . Remarkable.”—MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times

“Marvelous . . . A jewel of a novel . . . 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 through upheaval. . . . It is [the] ordinary magic in Ms. García’s novel and her characters’ sense of their own lyricism that make her work welcome as the latest sign that American literature has its own hybrid offspring of the Latin American school.”—THULANI DAVIS, The New York Times Book Review

“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

“Remarkable . . . A rich and haunting narrative . . . An intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . Evocative and lush.”—JACKIE JONES, San Francisco Chronicle

“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 Moré.”—AMELIA WEISS, Time