Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | FICTION CRU | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION CRU | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION CRU | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
Shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction
"Through a novel with so much depth, beauty, and grace, we, like Ana, are forever changed." --Jacqueline Woodson, Vanity Fair
"Gorgeous writing, gorgeous story." --Sandra Cisneros
Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn't matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year's Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan's free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay.
As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family's assets, leaving Cesar to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, see a movie at Radio City Music Hall, go dancing with Cesar, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family.
In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Angie Cruz's Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.
Author Notes
Angie Cruz is the author of the novels Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee , a finalist in 2007 for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has published work in The New York Times, VQR, Gulf Coast Literary Journal, and other publications, and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. She is founder and editor in chief of Aster(ix), a literary and arts journal, and is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The demands and expectations of family are an overpowering force in this enthralling story about Dominican immigrants in the mid-1960s from Cruz (Let It Rain Coffee). Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion, living in the Dominican countryside, becomes Ana Ruiz when she bends to her mother's pressure and marries the brutish 32-year-old Juan, who has recently emigrated to America and is scratching out a living in New York. Juan and his brothers intend to build a restaurant on the Cancion family land back in the Dominican Republic, and part of the plan is for the brothers to first raise money by working in New York. When Juan brings Ana to the city, she's overwhelmed, learning hard lessons about the locals and her husband--who's abusive until Ana becomes pregnant--and she grows closer to Juan's younger brother, Cesar. Ana comes of age while the Vietnam War protests surge around her in New York, and when the brewing conflict in the Dominican Republic erupts, Ana becomes determined to earn her own money and bring her mother and siblings to the relative safety of the States. The intimate workings of Ana's mind are sometimes childlike and sometimes tortured, and her growth and gradually blooming wisdom is described with a raw, expressive voice. Cruz's winning novel will linger in the reader's mind long after the close of the story. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Cruz masterfully provides insight into the 1960s Dominican immigration to the U.S. through the experiences of her 15-year-old protagonist, Ana Canción. The vivid descriptions of the pressures Ana endures at home set the context for her expedient marriage to the much older Juan Ruiz, who will enable her family to move to New York City. Cruz is consistently strong in her characterization and treats everyone from the desperately ambitious Mama to the conflicted Juan with empathy, while Ana is her crowning achievement as she emerges from girlhood to become a resolute and focused young woman. Sensual and fearful of sin, Ana struggles to choose between obligation and love, her husband and his younger brother. This is not an immigrant tale about magically achieving the American dream or any other successes; instead it captures the gritty reality of starting out in a new land with no real footholds. In Ana's fierce dreams for her child, and Juan's tender hopes for the next generation, Cruz creates an unforgettable portrayal of immigrant motivation. Cruz's ability to create mood and atmosphere with her distinctive writing style make her a strong voice in Dominican American literature.--Shoba Viswanathan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The titular Dominicana of Angie Cruz¿s third novel refers to both her narrator, Ana, and a hollow ceramic doll that serves as a vessel for all her secrets. It¿s an apt metaphor for Ana¿s role in her family: carrying within herself all their hopes to eventually build a life in the United States. The novel begins in the Dominican countryside with a marriage proposal, by the 28-year-old Juan to an 11-year-old Ana. Her parents delay the formal engagement until she is 15, and Ana and Juan are married on the last day of 1964. The next morning they fly to New York City, where Juan began his life in America years earlier. This marriage is bigger than me, Ana confides. Juan is the ticket for all of us to eventually go to America. Her story offers an intimate portrait of the transactional nature of marriage and the economics of both womanhood and citizenship, one all too familiar to many first-generation Americans. An alcoholic day-worker and entrepreneur, Juan quickly turns abusive, slapping her so you remember, when I say not to do something, you have to respect it. Ana soon learns she¿s pregnant; in a letter so thin and damp from the humidity of her home country, her mother calls the baby gold in the bank. As the months pass, we see in real time how a person can be ground down day by day, as Ana is taught by both her mother and her husband to expect less and less out of life. Ana¿s world feels oppressive in its confinement: Juan rarely lets her leave their building (Don¿t open the door for anyone. Don¿t leave the apartment). The few times she disobeys him are her only chances at adventure, filling Ana with a mix of relief, terror and pride.
Guardian Review
From birth, Ana Canción has been told that her green eyes are "a winning lottery ticket". She is a country girl with modest horizons but her mother - determined and frequently cruel - has a plan to get the family out of the Dominican Republic to the promised land of America. So it is that Ana, all of 15 years old, is married off to 32-year-old Juan Ruiz, who will take her to New York with him. They arrive on New Year's Day 1965 - bad luck, Ana thinks, "because it's like entering a room without going through a door". She has travelled on a fake passport that claims she is 19, but it isn't just four years of her life that she has lost. The idea was that Ana, once married, would demand money, an education, papers enabling her parents and siblings to join her. Juan, with his polished shoes and "soft, pillowy hands and cheeks", turns out to be a tight-fisted brute, and Ana finds herself trapped in a squalid sixth-floor apartment in Washington Heights, unable to speak a word of English. "Bully me, and I transform into an ant," she confides. It's a grim portrait of what it means to be doubly disenfranchised as a female illegal immigrant in an oppressively patriarchal community, but Angie Cruz gives her heroine a glimpse of a different life when Juan has to travel home for two months, leaving his spirited younger brother, César, to look out for her. Together, they eat hotdogs at Coney Island and dance at the Audubon Ballroom. César also helps her earn money of her own, which she stashes in a ceramic doll bought in Santo Domingo airport. "My sweet, hollow Dominicana will keep all my secrets," she pledges. It helps that the doll, with heavy symbolism, has neither eyes nor mouth. In the acknowledgments of this absorbing if imperfect exploration of the transactional bargains that women are forced to strike is a plea for film and photographic footage of New York's Dominican community from the 1950s to the 1980s. The kind of colour that such an archive might yield is precisely what's missing from the narrative. While its Dominican sections evoke skin that tastes of the ocean, a place where the ground is strewn with ripe apricots and radios fill the air with song, in the main it could be set almost any time, any place. There are moments, too, when the dialogue seems jarringly anachronistic. "You have rights," Ana's older sister tells her with marriage looming, "you're the boss of you." This, Cruz's third novel, is on the longlist for this year's Women's prize for fiction. She was inspired to write it by her mother's experience, but when told about the project, the older woman was apparently unconvinced: "Who would be interested in a story about a woman like me? It's so typical." Typical but rarely represented among mainstream narratives, Cruz counters, echoing a heated scene in which Ana scours the newspaper for word on the political violence that has overwhelmed her native country, finding only a report about a Dominican playboy. "Nobody cares about us," she rails to César. His response? To push pen and paper her way.
Kirkus Review
Ana Cancin is 15 when her parents marry her off to 32-year-old Juan Ruiz as part of a business arrangement, and she leaves her family farm in the Dominican Republic to move to New York City.In this coming-to-America story, the harsh realities of immigration are laid bare, but equally clear are the resilience and resourcefulness of the people who choose to make a new life far from home. It's the early 1960s, and there is tumult in the U.S. and abroadthe Vietnam War is raging, and the D.R. plunges into chaos when dictator Rafael Trujillo is assassinated. Author Cruz (Let It Rain Coffee, 2006, etc.) based the book on her own mother's experiences, and Ana's narration is wry and absorbing. Once Ana has arrived at her new apartment in Washington Heights, Juan proves himself to be a lousy husband, at best demanding and at worst abusive. At first, Ana's days are a bleak litany of chores and unwanted sex. But slowly, her life in New York begins to broaden, especially when Juan travels back to the D.R. on an extended business trip. By now, Ana is pregnant, but with Juan away, she is free to take English classes from the nuns across the street and scheme up ways to earn her own money, selling fried pastelitos with the help of her brother-in-law, Csar. Csar is younger than Juan, more fun than his brother, and kinder, too. Csar reminds Ana that joy existsand that it can be hersas when he surprises her with her first hot dog at Coney Island. Ultimately, though, Ana is her own strength and salvation. As she tells her ill-fated brother, Yohnny, before she leaves for New York, "I don't need anyone to save me."A moving, sad, and sometimes disarmingly funny take on migration and the forces that propel us into the world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
