A review by caribbeangirlreading
Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina by Raquel Cepeda

3.0

I'm half Dominican, a history nerd and a genealogy nerd. If not for those three things this book would have gotten a two-star rating. I did feel like I walked away knowing more about Caribbean and Dominican history and will be forever grateful for the author for bringing Dr. Frank Moya Pons and Chief Jorge Estevez to my attention. I will definitely be reading their work to educate myself more on the topics of history, race and ethnicity in the Dominican Republic. As a reader, though, I felt that many times Cepeda veered into the projection of 20th/21st feminist and racial ideas into colonial history. She beat the reader over the head with her opinions and even as someone who agreed with her I find this off-putting in an author. As for the memoir part of her book I felt it was well written and compelling, until she reached her senior year in high school and then the book lost focus. In the end I felt that much of the first half of the book, especially the details about her abusive parents, did not support her genealogy and family history search. This book could have been so much better but the editing left a lot to be desired.