A review by brittknitsokc
When We Left Cuba by Chanel Cleeton

3.0

When We Left Cuba tells the story of Beatriz Perez, whose brother was killed during the revolution and who is trying to make a life for herself and find ways to help her country after fleeing with her family. I started it right before a busy time at work, so it took me a long time to get through it and might have affected my opinion of the first half of the book; it seemed to start out slowly and I had trouble getting into it. When I got to the middle, I had more time and finally got hooked. I enjoyed the pace from the middle onward and the fact that the story followed Beatriz to interesting places. The book is similar to The Time in Between, in that it’s about a woman spy, but some of the writing was a bit too cheesy and predictable. I think I would have enjoyed it more if there was more background history about the revolution and how people were actually fighting back, but I think some of that might be in the companion book, Next Year in Havana, which came out first.