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Book Summary and Reviews of Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García

Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina García

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  • Published:
  • Feb 1993, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Dazzling ... Remarkable." —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." —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." —Los Angeles Times

This information about Dreaming in Cuban was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Information

Cristina García is the author of seven novels, most recently King of Cuba, and the forthcoming Berliners Who. She has published poetry, books for young readers, and edited anthologies on Latino/a literature. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and an NEA grant, among others. García has taught at universities nationwide and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

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