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A review by esessa
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet
5.0
I bought this book after students at Georgia Southern University burned it in protest after Capó Crucet visited their campus on a book tour and dared to speak about white privilege to the little conservative snowflakes. I was glad to buy it on principle, and was rewarded in the reading. The most striking part of this story, to me, was her account of the experience of a first generation student at a fancy Ivy League school, especially the bafflement she experienced during her first weeks and months on campus. I went to the same university as Capó Crucet, which is thinly veiled and renamed in the book (more on that below), and I while remember feeling out of place, I at least knew roughly what to expect. I've never been able to internalize or understand so clearly what a place like that must feel like for a first generation student as I did when reading this book - the way she articulates the thoughts and feelings of her younger self was masterful, and incredibly relatable. I found the sections about her family in Miami less accessible, mostly because her mother and sister were totally insufferable - this almost derailed me about 50 pages into the book, but I persisted because the sections set at the college were so well done.
My only major gripe with the book was Capó Crucet's decision to pseudonymize two entities: Elián González and Cornell University. The story takes place in 1999-2000, and the immigration debate/debacle over González, whom she renames Ariel Hernandez, figures extremely prominently in the book, and it unfolds exactly as it did in real life. Likewise, the school is obviously Cornell - that's where Capó Crucet actually went, and there are numerous Cornell-specific details that she transferred exactly onto her fictional Rawlings College. In both cases, the renaming seemed totally unnecessary. I get that it's a novel and not a memoir, but every time one of these details specific to González or Cornell came up under the different names, it gave me cognitive dissonance and pulled me out of the story. She could have kept the real names and still had it be a novel. Maybe a minor gripe, but it was an authorial decision I could not understand, and it annoyed me persistently!
My only major gripe with the book was Capó Crucet's decision to pseudonymize two entities: Elián González and Cornell University. The story takes place in 1999-2000, and the immigration debate/debacle over González, whom she renames Ariel Hernandez, figures extremely prominently in the book, and it unfolds exactly as it did in real life. Likewise, the school is obviously Cornell - that's where Capó Crucet actually went, and there are numerous Cornell-specific details that she transferred exactly onto her fictional Rawlings College. In both cases, the renaming seemed totally unnecessary. I get that it's a novel and not a memoir, but every time one of these details specific to González or Cornell came up under the different names, it gave me cognitive dissonance and pulled me out of the story. She could have kept the real names and still had it be a novel. Maybe a minor gripe, but it was an authorial decision I could not understand, and it annoyed me persistently!