Make Your Home Among Strangers: A Novel - Softcover

Crucet, Jennine Capó

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250094550 ISBN 13: 9781250094551

Publisher: Picador, 2016

Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Latino-themed Fiction 2016, Longlisted for the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Named a best book of the season by Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, Redbook, Bustle, NBC Latino and Men's Journal

The arresting debut novel from award-winning writer Jennine Capó Crucet

When Lizet-the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the first in her family to graduate from high school-secretly applies and is accepted to an ultra-elite college, her parents are furious at her decision to leave Miami. Just weeks before she's set to start school, her parents divorce and her father sells her childhood home, leaving Lizet, her mother, and Leidy-Lizet's older sister, a brand-new single mom-without a steady income and scrambling for a place to live.

Amidst this turmoil, Lizet begins her first semester at Rawlings College, distracted by both the exciting and difficult moments of freshman year. But the privileged world of the campus feels utterly foreign, as does her new awareness of herself as a minority. Struggling both socially and academically, she returns to Miami for a surprise Thanksgiving visit, only to be overshadowed by the arrival of Ariel Hernandez, a young boy whose mother died fleeing with him from Cuba on a raft. The ensuing immigration battle puts Miami in a glaring spotlight, captivating the nation and entangling Lizet's entire family, especially her mother.

Pulled between life at college and the needs of those she loves, Lizet is faced with difficult decisions that will change her life forever. Urgent and mordantly funny, Make Your Home Among Strangers tells the moving story of a young woman torn between generational, cultural, and political forces; it's the new story of what it means to be American today.

About this title

Review

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

About the Author

Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of two previous books and is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. Her novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice book, the winner of the 2016 International Latino Book Award, and was cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, the Guardian, and the Miami Herald; it has been adopted as an all-campus read at over twenty-five American universities. Her short stories have been honored with the Iowa Short Fiction Award, an O. Henry Prize, and other awards. Raised in Miami, Florida, she is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1250094550
• ISBN 13: 9781250094551
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416