Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia

★★★★☆

Of Women and Salt tells the tale of the lives of five generations of Cuban women, jumping from present-day Miami to 19th century cigar factories in Cuba, as well as the story of a mother and daughter who have to deal with ICE detention centres. The lives of all these women are interconnected, and through their relationships and circumstances, the author discusses issues of immigration, motherhood, mother-daughter relationships, sexual violence, substance abuse and more.

The book’s prose is beautiful, and it packs a lot for such a short book – and that is perhaps its biggest flaw. By dealing with so many issues, characters, and timelines, it does not allow for certain stories to fully develop and although it reads as a collection of short stories, it isn’t one. Unfortunately, the characters the author chooses to focus on are not necessarily the best ones, and as a reader you long for the story to shift to the more interesting people. Nevertheless, this was an impressively ambitious debut novel, and the author has demonstrated real skill in developing characters and relationship