Dominicana
Dominicana by Angie Cruz
Reviewed by Jess
📙📙📙📙📙
The story of 15 year old Dominican girl Ana Canción is so powerful and moving I’m still thinking about her long after putting the book down. Forced to marry at such a young age and an immigrant in NYC in the 60s, where she knows no-one (not even her husband) and can’t speak the language, this is a tale of Ana searching for freedom from oppression and dreaming big in times of hardship. She wants to be so much more than just a meek wife, a housebound servant, her family’s “ticket to America”.
The immigrant story will always be fascinating to me, perhaps because my own family elders came to this country to make something of themselves. It’s a story we grow up hearing bits and pieces of but never put together whole. In the acknowledgements, Cruz says this novel was inspired by her own mother’s story. The richness in the details, the emotions jumping out of the page and the strong connection you feel to Ana are all testimony to both the power and inspiration a real story has and Cruz’s flawless writing. Ana’s NYC is only a few blocks big, but it’s immersive and I really felt like I was experiencing it with her. It’s so easy to forget whilst you read that Ana is so young; she has to deal with so much hardship beyond her years. The taste of freedom she gets in the city when her husband goes back to DR for a while is delicious and jubilant, especially after being under his oppressive thumb from their first meeting when she was only 11.
This was a completely new topic to me - the first time I’ve encountered a story of Dominican immigrants to America in all my years of reading, and I learnt so much. It just proves how important these voices are to explain the fabric of our multicultural cities. In places like NYC where the foundations belong to the service workers, from the bodega owners to the hotel maids and the factory workers and food servers, immigrants are all vital. Recent political climates have demonised and disenfranchised them, but in reality the American dream is undeniably theirs too, as Cruz so vividly shows in the pages of this novel. I loved this book so much, and you definitely will too.
