Make Your Home Among Strangers: A Novel

Make Your Home Among Strangers: A Novel

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. 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 In this beautifully written and compulsively readable coming-of-age novel, Lizet is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the first in her family to attend college—and it's not Miami-Dade Community College, either; it's Rawlings College, an elite liberal arts school in upstate New York, where Lizet has received a full scholarship. While Lizet is away from home, experiencing snow for the first time and finding out just how poorly Hialeah Lakes High School prepared her for higher education, her family and boyfriend Omar continue their lives in Miami and don't understand what Lizet is doing. It's 1999, and Lizet's mother is caught up in the case of five-year-old Cuban refugee Ariel Hernandez (a fictionalized but essentially accurate version of the Elián González case), which serves as a mirror for Lizet's own situation of being torn between two cultures. Lizet's trips home at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter reveal the growing distance between where she came from and where she wants to go. VERDICT Capó Crucet has created an utterly believable character in Lizet, whose struggles with family, studies, friendships, culture, identity, and the nature of home will resonate with older teens who are preparing to leave their own childhood homes.—Sarah Flowers, formerly of Santa Clara County (CA) Library “Jennine Capó Crucet's smart, scathing, and hilarious depiction of a Cuban-American girl at a fancy northeastern university is set in 1999 - and involves and Elián González-inspired subplot - but its incisive take on race and class makes it both urgently of-the-moment and destined to be a classic