Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia

Today’s novel was first published in 2021.  It is the first novel by Gabriela Garcia, a fiction writer, poet and journalist. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University. She is the daughter of immigrants from Mexico and Cuba and grew up in Miami.

Of Women and Salt was one of the books discussed at the recent Literary Quartet held by the Anglistik Department of Innsbruck University.

The introduction on the back of the book reads: “We are force. We are more than we think we are.”

‘1866, Cuba.  Maria Isabel works in a cigar factory as her country buckles under political upheaval. Soon she begins to see marriage and motherhood as her best options, but the sounds of war are approaching.
Almost 100 years later, as Maria Isabel’s descendant Dolores watches her husband make for the mountains to answer to Fidel Castro’s call to arms, she decides to commit an act of violence to protect her children, even if it might destroy her daughter Carmen’s world.
In Miami in 2016, Carmen wrestles with her past as she fights to save her daughter, Jeanette, from drug addiction. But Jeanette must save herself, she must learn her family’s history, and so she travels to Cuba, to her grandmother’s crumbling house, in whose walls lies a secret that might just tie together this fearless line of women. ‘

Music played
Three tracks from the Buena Vista Social Club’s  CD – released 1997
1. Chan Chan
2. Dos Gardenias
3. El Carratero

This month’s book recommendations from our Reading Circle members.

• Poison Lilies and Dark August by Katie Tallow –  riveting thrillers
• Gerard Donovan by Julius Winsome – what isolation does to people.
• Virago Book of Women Travellers edited by Mary Morris with Larry O’Connor – three hundred years of female wanderlust
• 10,000 Schritte in Wien – Walks in Vienna, in German.
• ‚Mad Honey‘ by Jodi Picault – what we choose to keep from our past and what we choose to leave behind.
• Infinite Country by Patricia Enge – a novel of migration and the Colombian diaspora. People fleeing from Colombia
• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver – a retelling of ‘David Copperfield’ in a contemporary South Appalachian setting.
• Oh William by Elizabeth Strout – Lucy Barton reconnects with her first husband.