Review by Booklist Review
In this lucid and unfeigned collection of nine essays, including several originally appearing in the New York Times, a Cuban American writer questions the impact of one's skin color on the definition of one's identity and one's sense of belonging. In her third book Crucet (Make Your Home among Strangers, 2015) reflects on her decision to attend Cornell, her experience at a rodeo camp, buying houses in Florida and Nebraska, her attempts to crash weddings, swaying her Cuban mom to vote for a particular candidate in the presidential election, and her father's reluctance to read her books, among other intriguing subjects. Although she encounters racist behavior that would seem to merit commentary, just like an outsider who ventures into a foreign land, she finds that there can be safety in silence. Crucet's essays are hopeful, though grounded in the recognition that the social systems in place will not shift anytime soon. Sympathetic and encouraging, Crucet's observations and experiences offer a path toward learning how we can become less foreign to each other.--Andrienne Cruz Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this conversational and often comic memoir-in-essays, Cuban American novelist Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers) examines entitlement and dislocation in a white world. In 1999, Crucet and her family drove from Miami to Cornell University (she was the first in her family to attend college), ignorant of the "extra long twin sheets, mesh laundry bags" she would need for her dorm but eager for an education that "would plug me into a kind of access and privilege I didn't yet have a name for." In "Say I Do," she writes of her immersion into a white world that had her "marrying a gringo" she met in college at 23; she describes their Cuban wedding at "a parrot-infested jungle island theme park in Miami Beach" as "edutainment for the white guests." Crucet writes in "Going Cowboy" of leaving Florida in 2015 to teach at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and of staying at a working cowboy ranch "to see the real Nebraska." Shaken by the owner's rant "about Mexicans getting passes into the United States," she acknowledges that her "light skin and the privileges it affords" let her pass as white, admitting, "I was helping him perpetuate his ignorance by choosing instead to ensure my own safety." An excellent prose stylist, Crucet easily immerses readers in her narrative. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In her first book of essays, Crucet (English & ethnic studies, Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln; Make Your Home Among Strangers) reflects on her experiences as a first-generation college student, as well as the limits of the American Dream, Cuban and American politics, marriage and divorce, culture clashes, financial planning, working in academia, and family communication and conflicts in theory-informed, narrative-driven essays. As a Latina and first-generation American, Crucet takes on privilege, whitesplaining, and white tears; the gulf that can grow between first- generation Americans and their immigrant families; and the contradictions and self-deceptions inherent in the American Dream. Notably, the author also discusses the role of fantasy in dominant U.S. culture and the importance and potential of reclaiming fantasy in order to envision one's possible future(s); the promise of color-blindness and the reality of cultural erasure; and the way dominant cultures change depending on where you are, and how what seems possible in one place becomes impossible elsewhere. VERDICT Crucet's well-written essays are entertaining and accessible, without letting readers or the author herself off the hook for reflecting on and addressing cultural issues. Strongly recommended for all readers.--Monica Howell, Northwestern Health Sciences Univ. Lib., Bloomington, MN
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Autobiographical essays reveal the challenges of a first-generation American.New York Times contributing opinion writer Crucet (English and Ethnic Studies/Univ. of Nebraska; Make Your Home Among Strangers, 2015, etc.), winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, among other awards, makes an affecting nonfiction debut with a collection of essays that explore family, culture, and her identity as a Cuban American. Her parents, Cuban refugees, named her after a beauty queen in the Miss USA pageant. They believed that "you give your kids white American names so that their teachers can't tell what they are before meeting them," and so they have a better chance at avoiding prejudice. For Crucet's mother, "her ideal daughter was a white girl because she had long internalized the idea that as Latinas, we'd be treated as lesser, that we were somehow lesser. And she just wanted better for me, which meant: whiter." Because she grew up seeing Cubans who worked as doctors, police officers, and teachers, she did not realize, until she went to college in upstate New York, that mainstream American culture looked predominantly white. As a light-skinned Latina, Crucet often made a deliberate choice not to reveal her racial identity. In college, when she read Nella Larsen's novel Passing, she "first recognized this trespassing as an act in which I had sometimes found myself but didn't yet know how to define" and first noticed that whites "who misread me as also white" sometimes showed "the kind of pervasive racism usually reserved for white-only spaces." Among the "white-only spaces" she sensitively examines are Disney World, "grounded in whiteness and heteronormative gender roles"; college classes, where white professors and white students singled her out "as the official Latinx ambassador"; the process of planning a wedding to a man who came from "a white monolingual American family"; and a cattle ranch in Nebraska, where she signed up to work with the hope of learning something about the culture of her prospective students at the university.Thoughtful, deftly crafted reflections on race and identity. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
