Reviews with content warning for Cancer - Of Women and Salt

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Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia

50 reviews

sassylk's review against another edition

emotional hopeful inspiring tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

I don’t know what I thought about this, to be honest. The ending made me cry a lot, but that is also wound up with my own emotional vulnerability at the moment, so I’m not sure it’s anything to go off in terms of quality. I liked the sporadically beautiful prose, and I thought the interweaving of women’s stories was a lovely concept, but I found it quite difficult to remember who was talking, what year it was, and what had happened to who. At times it felt less like there were individual plots and more like Garcia had just tried to pack as much trauma into the novel as she possibly could. I guess the ending wrapped it up in some way (

and I’m glad Ana was given a happy ending, the girl has been through enough!

). It was interesting to learn more about the history of Cuba, and it was clever to show this through a fictional family history as well. So yeah, on the whole I enjoyed it, but at times I found it hard to keep up with the constant narrative switching.

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bobked's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

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inlaraland's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

4.5 / 5

This short historical-fiction novel packs a punch. With about 200 pages, Gabriela Garcia knits a patchwork of stories from the various female characters (set in different timelines) and weaves a moving tale that discusses the pain of suffering under political struggle, immigration, loss, and addiction. There is an emphasis on generational trauma, which is told through the relationships between the mothers and daughters in this novel. The narrative isn't quite linear, and each chapter reads more like a short story. However, when it all comes together in the end, you feel the heavyweight of emotion that author has been building from the first chapter. This book will challenge your perception and remind you of privileges that most people can easily take for granted. I didn't anticipate giving this book such a high rating when I first started reading, but the breathtaking writing and gut wrenching story is one I consider a favorite.

If you've enjoyed "Pachinko" and "The Mountains Sing" then I think you'll really like this one!

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tctimlin's review against another edition

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challenging emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

With a timeline that jumps from the 1800’s to the present day, not chronologically, the book follows several women, mostly immigrants to the US from Cuba and El Salvador. The novel explores the immigrant experience, the plight of those left behind, the difference between the reception of the political asylees from Cuba and the unwanted refugees from Central America.

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annalu's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional informative tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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just_one_more_paige's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This has such an intriguing and poetic title! Plus, I'm always interested in small/short novels like this - it seems like there is not enough space to make an impact and yet often these are some of the most intense and insightful reads. (I'm thinking of Convenience Store Woman as another that, for all its brevity, made a major impression.) So yea, I wanted to check this one out.

Of Women and Salt follows an intergenerational line of women from two families. The first focuses, in the present day, on Jeanette, a Cuban-American living in Miami, struggling with addiction, who attempts to find herself by traveling to Cuba to learn more about her family's history. Jeanette's mother, Carmen, is dealing with coming to terms with her daughter's reality, while steadfastly leaving her past, the time she spent raised in Cuba, in the past. Carmen's mother, Dolores, remains in Cuba, having done her level best to protect her daughters from the turmoil around them (internal to their family and external in Cuba) as they were growing up. And even further back, we learn of the more historic beginnings of Jeanette's family, back in the late 1800s when Cuba fought for independence from Spain. Jeanette's family story is interwoven with that of Gloria and her daughter Ana, who is taken in by their neighbor, Jeanette, for a short time (on a whim), when Gloria is taken by ICE and Ana is dropped off at an empty home after school. From Cuba to Miami to Mexico to a detention center in Texas, this novel follows women, telling the stories of mothers and daughters over generations, as they survive and live.

Let me start with the writing. It was gorgeous. I listened to a short interview between the author and Roxane Gay at the end of the audiobook and it turns out that Garcia also writes poetry and you can absolutely tell. The writing has a rhythm to it that is both effortless and literary, and the combination gives a gorgeous flow. There were also a few standout moments for me, like the imagery of paralleled birth and death by gunfire (in defense of freedom/liberty), that were particularly searing. The title itself, as I mentioned, is part of what pulled me to this book to begin with, and it delivers on that promise. The ways that the salt of women – sweat, tears, oceans, attitudes – are portrayed throughout, both literally and metaphorically, is poignant. I will say that there were a times where the writing (the POV, the style, a non-linear temporal progression) changed from chapter to chapter, as there were a variety of voices narrating this story. It sometimes made the novel feel more like a connection of interconnected short stories that a single compiled story, which could be off-putting. I think in the end, the rest of what I loved made up for that bit of separation/jumpiness.

Topically, this was a very impactful read, tackling the complexities of intergenerational trauma, domestic abuse, colonialism, addiction, immigration and border-crossing and ICE/deportation. And in such a short work, I was deeply impressed with the nuance with which each was handled. There was depth to each character’s experience that had me fully connected to each, even though our time spent with each was so short. It really helped, I think, that each character’s time in focus give insight to their life, as well as providing insight for a few of the other as well. Lovely dimension. And the language used to describe some of these concepts, questions like “does loss unspoken become an inherited trait?” and observations like “even the best mothers in the world, can’t always save their daughters” and “there is no ‘minor’ in abuse,” no spectrum…it was all just truly on point.

Overall, the way Garcia portrays the cycle of women (and motherhood roles, in particular) is incredibly discerning. She pinpoints how they fail each other and how they make up for it elsewhere. How sometimes even that isn’t enough and, in the end, forgiveness and reuniting don’t happen because the gulf is too big. How even though (each and every time) there is a shared goal of something better/more, the difference in the definitions and abilities to achieve it are different enough to create an insurmountable gulf. It hits in the feels in so many ways, universal in emotion despite the specificity of the individual lives. A lovely short read that definitely embodies the particular power and sorrow of women.

"I want to know who I am, so I need to know who you've been."

“If safe were a place, it would look nothing like any of the options, and I want to scream but I swallow, I want to claw but I smile, because I need to seem good.”

“Motherhood: question mark, a constant calculation of what-if.”

“What kind of fear is credible? There are so many kinds of fear.”

“...there are no real rules that govern why some are born in turmoil and others never know a single day in which the next seems an ill-considered bet. It's all lottery, Ana, all chance. It's the flick of a coin, and we are born.”

“Why? Why dwell, why talk, what good would it do? She had mastered a life without unearthing her own horror stories [...] the past haunted only if you let it.”

“As if anything were about beauty. Or want.”

“…how will I survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and when will I stop feeling exhausted from all the surviving?”

“For so long, she'd had a different story about her own trajectory. She marveled at the way memory became static history, this thing so easily manipulated and shaped by her own desires.”

“Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. There was always more.”

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