What I’ve Been Reading Lately…

Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros

Caramelo tells the story of four generations of women through the eyes and storytelling of the great granddaughter. Going back and forth between Mexico, Chicago, and San Antonio, the narrator takes turns telling the story of each of her ancestors, with her own story interspersed throughout. It is similar to The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez in that it tells the story of a family; but instead of employing magical realism, Cisneros employs social criticism of society’s treatment of women both in Mexico and in the U.S. It offers a depressing but true perspective on the (very) different expectations society has for women and men, and how men’s mistakes are often accepted as part of who they are while women’s mistakes cause them to be rejected as people, as can be seen in the narrator’s father, who had a child out of wedlock with no repercussions, while the woman he had the child with is punished for the rest of her life. The only thing that put a damper on my reading of this wonderful novel is knowing that Cisneros supported the awful novel American Dirt which not only utilizes harmful stereotypes and tropes from Latinx culture, but was also partly plagiarized. Articles about Cisnero’s fervent support for the novel can be easily found on Google.

~~~

Keeping Up With Magda, Isla Dewar

Keeping Up With Magda was long-listed for the Women’s Prize in its first year, and is short novel about a woman who leaves her life behind after suffering a stillbirth and goes to live in a small seaside Scottish town to recover and try to learn what she really wants from life. At the same time, it also tells the story of an illiterate chef who works at the town’s only diner and effect she has (and has had) on each person who interacts with her, the main character included. By the end of the book, the main character is still trying to figure out which version of her life she wants, the one in the big city with the good job and her friends, or the new one she has created in the village, and in leaving it up to chance while skipping stones on the seashore, discovers the answer. The first years of the Prize’s choices were… interesting, to say the least, and I would classify this book as a beach read to be honest. And to clarify, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a beach read—I actually took it to the beach with me!—but the Prize nowadays, in my opinion, selects more serious book for its short and long lists.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *