Why a Booktrail?
1998 – 2023: What does it mean to belong?
1998 – 2023: What does it mean to belong?
Rafaela remembers everything that matters: her beautiful childhood in San Juan, her marriage to Peter, uprooting their children, Ruth and Benny, to the American Midwest, and losing all sense of her place in the world. So she tells no one when her memory begins to slip.
Her daughter, in New York with a family of her own, wishes she could forget her muddy feelings about where she comes from – the same feelings which motivated her 22-year-old daughter Daisy to reconnect with their past.
Daisy, who has momentarily forgotten everything, hears the word critical in a hospital room in San Juan and remembers, all at once, the car that hurtled towards her, the terrible storm, and something else. What was it?
Now Ruth and Rafaela must return to the city where it all began, to gather by Daisy’s bedside and confront the twists of fate that have caused a growing rift in their family and led them to this moment.
San Juan, Puerto Rico
The way in which we can feel that a place is home is deftly explored in this book. It is in fact not just a love letter to Puerto Rico but to the global diaspora, and every expat who longs for home.
San Juan is the location but the setting is really the push and pull between a person’s individual identity and their ancestral ties.
San Juan and Puerto Rico makes for a compelling and culturally interesting backdrop and also a keen part of the story.
There are other locations in the novel such as New York but the are secondary to PR and so not on the map.
Destination/Location: San Juan, Puerto Rico Author: Jeanine Cummins Departure: 1978 – 2023
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