On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuäna y Daubâon has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments. In the 1980s, against the backdrop of her mother's isolation in St. Louis, Missouri, Rafaela's daughter, Ruth Brennan, wants only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. It's not until decades later when Ruth's own daughter Daisy returns to San Juan that her mother and grandmother begin to truly reflect on the choices that have come to define their lives.
Mostly entrancing ... The various timelines can be confusing at times, necessitating doubling back to reread. Those shifts also limit how thoroughly we get to know the main characters and their supporting casts. It’s only in the novel’s final third, when strands converge, that we become emotionally invested in the plights of these protagonists ...
There is a radiance to this saga, as vivid as the scenes set in a sumptuous San Juan ... Especially in this anti-immigrant era, the empathy with which Cummins envisions her characters is a poignant reminder that it is actual human beings who approach our borders, each with a singular story to tell.
As a novel, Speak to Me of Home didn’t make much of an impression on me. It belongs to a genre of commercial women’s fiction that generally leaves me cold. But as a riposte, skillfully mounted while at the same time well shielded from the counterattacks typical of its targets, this book earned my respect ... There’s a tepid mystery set up at the beginning of the book, but nothing to compare to the breathless, thrillerlike, what-would-you-do? plotting of American Dirt. Whether Speak to Me of Home will replicate the success of its predecessor seems uncertain, but it does wrestle, if obliquely, with American Dirt’s critics ... For all its bland conventionality as a piece of storytelling, Speak to Me of Home sneakily amounts to a well-argued case that Cummins herself is not merely a clueless white woman ... As dignified and graceful a follow-up as anyone could have executed, one that acquiesces to the identity obsessions of her critics by staying in her own ethnic lane, while at the same time reflecting back to them what Cummins experienced as their lack of charity and imagination.
Flat characters and cultural cliches make for a disappointing read ... Her depictions of Puerto Rican culture and the lives of her migrant characters here are occasionally more nuanced—colorism and class play significant roles in the plot—but Cummins still indulges in tired tropes ... None of the characters here emerge as real people. Even the dramatic revelation that animates the novel’s final act fails to provoke much in the way of conflict or change.
