Book overview
NATIONAL BESTELLER * Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the New American Voices Award * Named a Best Book of Summer by Time and Oprah Daily
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History comes an "intimate" (Time) memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history.
In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer's mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger story of a world historical revolution. Yet, in another more intimate family history, that choice was a crossroads, ultimately inseparable from who and what they all became.
In this "stirring" (The New York Times Book Review) and "beautiful" (NPR), memoir, Ferrer masterfully shifts between her roles as historian and family member, weaving a multigenerational tale that reaches into the past to understand the circumstances and choices that led to the present. We see key historical events through the eyes of the family: the grandmother who raised Poly after Ada's departure, a Black woman born a year after the end of slavery in Cuba; Ada's parents, forced to invent themselves anew in a foreign land; and two brothers left behind--Poly and another, once-secret brother named Juan Jos
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History comes an "intimate" (Time) memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history.
In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer's mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger story of a world historical revolution. Yet, in another more intimate family history, that choice was a crossroads, ultimately inseparable from who and what they all became.
In this "stirring" (The New York Times Book Review) and "beautiful" (NPR), memoir, Ferrer masterfully shifts between her roles as historian and family member, weaving a multigenerational tale that reaches into the past to understand the circumstances and choices that led to the present. We see key historical events through the eyes of the family: the grandmother who raised Poly after Ada's departure, a Black woman born a year after the end of slavery in Cuba; Ada's parents, forced to invent themselves anew in a foreign land; and two brothers left behind--Poly and another, once-secret brother named Juan Jos
