2021 is a Year to Look Forward to — Here are the Books That Will Get You There
Photo by Erika MorillThe books I recommend to you on this list are some of the most anticipated books of Winter/ Spring 2021. They take on subjects many of us are grappling with and often find ourselves alone in. I encourage you to make a date with friends, family, or your chosen reading community and invite them to read with you so you can travel places together. Plan to meet them virtually or in person and discuss over a meal or drink.
And if you are so inspired, DM me over social media and tell me how it went. I would love to know!
Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
“It was her idea to tie up the nun,” begins Patricia Engel’s new novel. Back in 2010, I fell hard for Patricia’s literary voice when she published her debut, Vida. Then I read Veins of the Ocean where she flexes her brilliant storytelling skills in ways that kept me up at night reading. But those of us who were lucky enough to receive early copies of Infinite Country agree: this is Engel at her best. She tells the story of a family from Colombia who are pulled apart by deportation. This is the kind of book that allows you to see and feel the whole issue, offering an intimate perspective of an experience that touches and impacts us all. My favorite review of this book thus far is from the great @lupitareads. I agree with Lupita, Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country has us feeling all the emotions!
My Broken Language by Quiara Alegria Hudes
This is her debut memoir and it’s just so good. Quiara Alegria Hudes is well known for her plays, including Water by the Spoonful, which won the Pulitzer in 2012. Much like her plays, which are known to be enormously empathic and funny, My Broken Language is rich with observant portraits like this one: “If you won a shopping spree and loaded your cart full of cousins, that was Abuela’s house.” Through and through, Hudes is a bonafide storyteller who has been forever training to tell stories by the women in her family, who cook, talk, light candles, and conjure the spirits. When Hudes goes dark she doesn’t flinch, and brings us in close, close, without cloaking the details. It’s clear that she wrote this book for those she loves. The language throughout is gorgeous and so moving.
What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster
Naima Coster’s second book does not preach, but reveals an expansive, vibrant tapestry that moves between the years, from the foothills of North Carolina, to Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Paris. What’s Mine and Yours is about parents who try and fail and then try again. It introduces us to an extraordinary cast of characters, and it is nuanced and full of insight. It’s about children who hold their loved ones accountable. It reveals in absolutely engrossing and tension-filled prose how a tragedy haunts a family. Coster is a master storyteller through and through.
White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing by Jennifer De Leon (March 2021)
For years I have been following Jenn De Leon’s career, reading her essays in journals like Ploughshares and Fourth Genre, and I am always compelled to share them with friends because they are so insightful and powerful. As a daughter of immigrant parents, I feel seen by De Leon’s work, and her prose is stunning. Her essays read like a blanket that I can cuddle up beneath. In one of the essays, De Leon says, “We have no control over the circumstances into which we are born. The ropes we reach for in trying to soar somewhere new, somewhere better, often carry us to unpredictable places.” These essays keep us in company as we ourselves face the unpredictable, straddling multiple realities.
Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia
Gabriela Garcia's debut novel begins,“At six thirty, when all the cigar rollers sat at their desks before their piles of leaves and the foreman rang the bell, María Isabel bent her head, traced a sign of the cross over her shoulders, and took the first leaf in her slender hands.” It takes us from a 19th-century cigar factory in Cuba to contemporary Miami; then Texas; then Mexico, then back to Cuba. I am a sucker for intergenerational family dramas with fraught mother and daughter relationships. I love them even more when I am brought into worlds like this historic moment in Cuba. Garcia’s vivid details and visceral prose made it so that I can almost taste “the earthy bitterness” of the tobacco leaf. Admittedly, I am only a few chapters in, but the book is so far a page-turner, and Garcia’s strong, willful women, who are negotiating how to survive in the world, are easy to fall for.
The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Parasite and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease by Daisy Hernandez
I have read a number of articles by Daisy Hernandez about Chagas disease. It is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus but less known, because the cases and those it inflicts don’t make the headlines. The question The Kissing Bug is trying to answer is timely: Who does the United States take care of, and who does it leave behind? Through the personal story of Hernandez’s family and countless interviews that include patients and epidemiologists, the inequity of the healthcare system is exposed. With so much tenderness, compassion, and intelligence, Hernandez has written a well-researched book, with the stories of the people impacted by this disease at the center.
Angie Cruz is the author of the novel Dominicana, which was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, and is the editor of Aster(ix) Journal. She's an associate professor at University of Pittsburgh where she teaches in the MFA program, and she splits her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Turin.
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