Speak to Me of Home
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 13, 2025
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
What does it mean to call a place home?
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeanine Cummins comes a deeply felt multigenerational family story
On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments.
In the 1980s, against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth, wants only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. It’s not until decades later when Ruth’s own daughter, Daisy, returns to San Juan that her mother and grandmother begin to truly reflect on the choices that have come to define their lives.
When a hurricane ravages the island in 2023, leaving Daisy critically injured, Rafaela and Ruth return to the city where their story began. As they gather at Daisy’s bedside, we follow them back into the moments that brought them to this point: We watch as they come of age, fall in love, take risks, and contend with all the heartbreaks, triumphs, and reversals of fortune—both good and bad—that make up a meaningful life. As old memories come to light, so do buried secrets, leaving everyone in the family wondering exactly where it is that they belong.
A striking, resonant examination of marriage, family, and identity, Speak to Me of Home is ultimately a story of mothers and daughters that asks: How can three women who share geography and genetics have such wildly different ideas of where they come from? And, more important, can they discover a common language to find their way back home?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cummins (American Dirt) serves up an engrossing if occasionally cloying family drama. In 2023 Palisades, N.Y., Ruth Hayes receives a phone call from a hospital in Puerto Rico. Her daughter, Daisy, who recently left college over Ruth's objections and moved to the island, has been hit by a car. From there, the narrative rewinds to San Juan in 1968, as Daisy's maternal grandmother, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón, prepares to marry her Irish American fiancé, Peter, despite his parents' misgivings. Later, when Peter moves his wife and two small kids back to his native Missouri, the cracks in their marriage deepen. Cummins devotes later sections to Ruth, both as a child in St. Louis watching her mother struggle and as an adult, mystified by her own three children. When her youngest, born Charlie Hayes, decides to change his name to Carlos Hayes-Acuña, Ruth feels "a tiny flare of anger... what right did Charlie have to try on as if it were a costume?" Despite some melodramatic moments and convoluted twists, Cummins succeeds at breathing life into her large cast of characters and excels at depicting the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship. This is worth a look.
