Dreaming in Cuban

Spanning the 1930s through the 1980s, Dreaming in Cuban follows three generations of the del Pino family, divided between Cuba and the United States by the revolution. Celia del Pino, the matriarch, stays on the island and remains devoted to the cause, writing unsent letters to a lost lover for twenty-five years. Her daughter Lourdes flees to Brooklyn, where she runs a bakery and clings fiercely to her adopted country. Lourdes's daughter Pilar, a rebellious young artist, is drawn back toward the grandmother and the homeland she barely remembers. García braids third-person narration, first-person voices, and epistolary fragments into a portrait of mothers and daughters unable to close the distance politics and exile have opened between them, yet unable to stop reaching across it.