Reviews with content warning for Trafficking - Of Women and Salt

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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leslie_overbookedsocialworker's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad 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? Yes

4.5

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kaddictwithapen's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

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saracatalyst's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad fast-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? Yes

4.5

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maregred's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

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

3.75

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writtenontheflyleaves's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia ❤️‍🔥
🌟🌟🌟✨
🏆 Winner of my personal Most Beautiful Book Cover Award

❤️‍🔥 The plot: From a cigar factory in 19th century Cuba to modern day Miami, through three generations of a Cuban family and one mother and daughter from El Salvador, Of Women and Salt explores mother-daughter relationships across time, over borders, and through the impossible hardships of addiction, upheaval, abuse, and racism.

You know when you meet someone you really like, and you hang out with them a few times and have a great time, then for no reason you can really discern it never goes anywhere? The kind of person you'll think about in a few years' time and think it's a shame you didn't get to know each other better, but also feel no great loss over? That was me with this book.

It really drew me in in the beginning. Maria Isabel was a fascinating character and I was really interested in the setting of 1866 Cuba. But then - as happens frequently throughout the novel - her narrative gets cut off as Garcia jumps to the next character. Mostly, I didn't feel like the proliferation of new characters and perspectives added much to one another on an emotional level, as Jeanette and her mother Carmen were the only ones you really spent enough time with to get to know. There were lots of points where it felt like short stories that had been stacked up together - individually, they were quite effective vignettes, but they didn't really have the strength to support a longer narrative.

One thing I did like, though, was how well Garcia demonstrated the proximity of the personal and the political. The personal crisis of Jeanette's addiction in the larger context of the opioid crisis; the ways in which border policies traumatise children and families. And while the different characters' perspectives didn't add much to each other in terms of making you feel for them, they did illuminate each woman's unique hypocrisy in a way that made them all feel more real.

I won't go into the ending except to say that it felt abrupt and a bit anticlimactic and I'm (appropriately) a little salty about it lol

❤️‍🔥 Read if you like short stories, mother-daughter relationships, and multi-generational narratives like Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

🚫 Avoid if you hate short stories, or aren't able to read about addiction, sexual violence, or the immigration system right now (there are quite a few harrowing detention centre scenes)

Content Warnings

nibs's review

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emotional slow-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? It's complicated

5.0

I think I found out about this book from Rosianna Halse Rojas recommending it somewhere. I've had it on my tbr for a while, and finally got around to it.

This book was so good. Its separate but intertwined characters reminded me of Girl, Woman, Other and There, There. All of these connected stories and connected characters, going through their lives a bit at a time. The generational storytelling is a form of solidarity. I want to read this again immediately.

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