Garcia, Cristina

New York. 1992. March 1992. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0679408835. 1st Novel. 246 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Chip Kidd. keywords: Literature Women Cuba Caribbean Latin America Ethnic America. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Cristina Garcia's vivid, funny, and endearing first novel moves back and forth between Havana and Brooklyn, and takes us into the heart of the del Pino family, introducing four wonderfully various, strong- willed women who are divided by conflicting political loyalties and bound together by their complicated love for one another. In Cuba: Celia, the aging del Pino matriarch whose consuming passion is for El Lider, Fidel. For his sake, she has worked the sugarcane harvest, acted as local judge, and now in old age - in her best housedress and drop pearl earrings - sits on her porch scanning the sea for the yanqui invaders she is certain will come . Also in Cuba, Celia's mad (and possibly murderous) daughter Felicia, who can't stay away from men or black magic. She is a lapsed hairdresser, a ‘social malcontent,' the despair of her mother (‘If only Felicia would take an interest in the revolution . it would give her a higher purpose'). In Brooklyn, we meet Celia's other daughter, her feisty antagonist, Lourdes-immigrant, capitalist, obsessed by her hatred of Fidel, proud proprietor of the Yankee Doodle Bakery, which is a hotbed of counterrevolution, a gathering place - according to Lourdes's daughter, Pilar - for ‘shady Cuban extremists who talk dinosaur politics and drink her killer espresso.' And finally, the sweet, skeptical, artistic punk, Pilar herself at war with her own impossible mother, visited in dreams by the abuela she has not seen since she was two - her faraway grandmother Celia-and determined to get them all back to Cuba before her own vision of it vanishes completely. (‘Every day Cuba fades a little more inside me, my grandmother fades a little more inside me. And there's only my imagination where our history should be.') A novel suffused with a generous and comic sense of life -about women and politics, women and magic, women caught in a far-flung, intricate, unbreakable web of family. inventory #26414 ISBN: 0679408835.