So, this book jumps around in time through the lives of its main characters, a grandmother, her two daughters and her granddaughter, letting us see how they react to the tumultuous events that make up Cuban history. It’s a kind of multi-generational family epic and I absolutely hated it. There’s a good idea here and there, but I just found the prose to be really bad; this is Garcia’s first novel and it shows. She tries to go into magical realism at time and it’s cringe-inducingly bad. There are sequences that work, but on the whole, I found this book to be a real slog, even though it’s under three-hundred pages. If the prose was better, there’d be more here, but as it is, about all you see is potential in the story and not even a whole lot of that. 1 star.
tl;dr – consistently mediocre and occasionally awful prose sinks this overly-ambitious multi-generational epic about Cuba; some ideas here and there, but what a slog. 1 star.