Dominicana, Angie Cruz
Dominicana tells the coming-of-age story of a young woman form the Dominican Republic who marries a man she does not love in order to help her family find economic stability. Angie Cruz has talked about how her grandmother’s own story inspired this novel, as well as the story of many young women like her, who obeyed their family’s wishes instead of their own and set about creating futures that they didn’t necessarily want, but that in the end, were their own. Ana, the protagonist of this story and only 15 years old, travels with her new husband to New York City after a sham wedding in her village. She knows only her husband and his brothers, does not speak English, and obeys her husband when he tells her to stay in the house. Isolated and alone, and then pregnant, Ana begins to discover who her husband really is while also getting to know his youngest brother, who she eventually falls in love with. Her husband gets papers for her mother and brother, and she is torn about what future to choose: the one where she stays with her abusive husband in order to help her family, or the one that would be completely for her and of her own desire, where she runs away with the man she loves. Cruz’s novel was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2020.
Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh
I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation last year and thought it was strange and grotesque in its own unique way, but now, after having read Eileen, I realize that this is just her style of writing. Eileen is both the protagonist and narrator of this slim novel, and her mind is not a happy place to be at all. Traumatized from a loveless childhood that left her feeling unwanted, unworthy, and undesirable, Eileen hates both herself and everyone around her. She is both her own harshest critic and also terribly judgmental of every person she comes into contact with. After the first 50 pages my mental state had taken a turn for the worse, and it got no better the further I went. Eileen is telling her story 50 years after the fact, but has seemed to gain no perspective, or remorse, for the crime she committed, which drove her to run away from home and abandon her past and everything in it for a new life in New York City. If Moshfegh’s other novel was problematic in that it dealt with upper class excesses that almost no normal person has the luxury for, this novel is almost its exact opposite, dealing with poverty in all its forms: lack of love, lack of financial security, lack of joy, and lack of motivation to find a way to have a better life, and leaves the reader disgusted with the narrator and disgusted with the world she was born into and forced to navigate through with little to no help.