Seven years on from American Dirt, her page-turning novel telling the story of a Mexican mother and her son fleeing for their lives to the US after a cartel-inflicted family tragedy, Jeanine Cummins delivers a quite different tale. Fans of American Dirt, of which there are many, despite an outcry over the author not being Mexican, should not expect another thriller. Speak to Me of Home is a sprawling family saga, the affectionate portrait of a Puerto Rican family. And it’s closer to the author’s roots. Cummins’ grandmother is Puerto Rican.
Not surprisingly, belonging and identity are central themes in Speak to Me of Home. They are conveyed through the alternating perspectives of three generations of women. Rafaela, a woman in her early 70s, and her daughter Ruth, both Puerto Rican-born, now live in Palisades, New York – sometimes called “Hollywood on the Hudson” because of all the well-known actors living there. Ruth’s 22-year-old daughter Daisy has defied her mother’s desire for her to pursue a university education, choosing instead to leave the US and live in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The novel opens in 2023, when Ruth receives a call with “terrible news” from San Juan, the nature of which is not revealed. Earlier on the same day in Puerto Rico, Daisy receives a package of DNA test results that make no sense, although the reason is not divulged. Only hours later she’s hospitalised after having been run over on her scooter by a car during a storm. However, no details of her injuries are provided.
The story travels back to 1968 to introduce Rafaela at 21 on the eve of her wedding to Peter, who’s Irish-American. She has just received a letter containing important information, though the contents are not disclosed, and Rafaela proceeds with the wedding.
Readers must wait until the end of the novel to find answers to all these questions.
Ruth is only 6 when she and her brother Benny are uprooted from San Juan in 1978 by her parents Rafaela and Peter to settle in St Louis, Missouri. Rafaela’s exposure to misogyny and racial bigotry in the city place a further strain on her marriage. Her life becomes one of “desolate emptiness”.
When Peter gains membership for his mixed-race family at the local country club, it comes with conditions. Rafaela suffers the indignity of being relegated to the staff locker room. Ruth and Benny likewise experience racial prejudice at school and struggle to settle.
Thirty-two years later, Ruth has become a widow with three children to raise. She creates “a whole new and separate reality” on Instagram, The Widow’s Kitchen, and amasses a following sufficiently large for her to monetise her online life and support her young family. “In The Widow’s Kitchen, everything was perfect. Ripe, juicy, colourful, clean.”
Cummins is skilled at carefully withholding information, propelling readers into a narrative that consists largely of backstories, though sometimes this is to the detriment of pace and tension. The novel jumps back and forth across numerous time periods, beginning in 1953, when Rafaela is 7, through to the novel’s present day of 2023. It spans significant turning points and events in the lives of the three women while strategically omitting others, until the penultimate moment in the story when loose ends are pulled together. Following three lives by way of multiple flashback chapters proved confusing at times, and required flicking back to the helpful Acuña Y Daubón family tree at the beginning of the book.
Cummins does, however, write with sensitivity about the painful pressure points in women’s lives when they’re confronted with impossible choices. Secrets in the family become tightly held, friction builds, and mysteries, misunderstandings and resentments simmer unresolved for years.
Towards the end of the novel, when the whole family is reunited around one character’s hospital bed, truths are revealed and new alliances forged. Cummins deftly brings her characters’ stories to redemptive and insightful landings. This is a book to be savoured on its own terms.
