Join Roxanne Coady, owner of RJ Julia Booksellers, for a deep discussion of Gabriela Garcia’s new novel, Of Women and Salt!
As we dive into plot, characters, and motifs, discussion topics may include the corrosive quality of secrets, mother-daughter relationships, and the impact of immigration on psyche and families.
Admission is complimentary with your purchase of the book!
A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born.
In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.
From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals — personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others — that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America’s most tangled, honest, human roots.
Gabriela Garcia is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in fiction from Purdue and lives in the Bay Area. Of Women and Salt is her first novel.
Roxanne J. Coady founded RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut in 1989, creating a business that is recognized as a national leader among independent booksellers. In 2009, Coady founded a personalized book subscription site, Just the Right Book. This site has a national reach and combines the intimacy of an independent bookstore with the digital marketplace.
In addition, Coady hosts a podcast available on iTunes, Just the Right Book, in which she interviews best-selling authors and people in the bookselling and publishing community.
Purchase a copy of Of Women and Salt to receive your invitation to the virtual event. Please note that this is not an author event and we cannot guarantee the author will be in attendance.
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