Make Your Home Among Strangers: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of August 2015: What is a family? How do we define home? These are the questions Jennine Capó Crucet addresses in her first novel after the prizewinning collection, How to Leave Hialeah. The daughter of Cuban immigrants in Miami, Lizet Ramirez is the first member of her family to graduate high school – and surely the first to have gotten admitted to a tony private college up north. Wise but naïve, ambitious but clueless, Lizet knows she wants to escape the world of misery in Little Havana – her teenage sister has just become a single mother; her passionate parents have finally split apart – but she doesn’t quite fit in at the mostly white and upper middle class place she’s going, either. (One of my favorite scenes involved a literature professor assuming that because she was of Latin American descent, freshman Lizet understood everything about the literary tradition known as Magical Realism.) Returning home for a surprise visit on Thanksgiving, she’s greeted by the news about the (real life) five-year-old Cuban boy, Ariel Hernandez, whose mother had died trying to bring him to the states; Hernandez became a cause celeb nationwide, particularly in Florida, and here in the novel as well, especially with Lizet’s lonely mother. Interspersing the two stories, Crucet shows us how two children, separated, for different reasons, from their families, are more alike than not. And how, like all of us, they eventually have to come to terms with their identities. – Sara Nelson