Immigration – …on the B.L.

The Farm by Joanne Ramos

August 13, 2019August 12, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth a Read Yes
Length 336
Quick Review Golden Oaks is a gilded cage for the very wealthy to know their babies are getting the best of everything including surrogates.

Reading The Farm by Joanne Ramos in Jacksonville, North Carolina. | Dress | Shoes | Sunglasses

Cover of The Farm by Joanne Ramos. | Dress |

The Farm is Joanne Ramos’ debut novel. Ramos balances the outlandish and the painfully possible reality the near future could hold for privileged and not-so-privileged parts of society.

Golden Oaks is a place where young, healthy, pretty, desperate-for-money women go to be Hosts for lavishly wealthy Clients in want of a baby or three. Located a few hours outside of New York City, it couldn’t be a safer or more beautiful place for a baby to grow under the watchful eye of trained health professionals looking after every aspect of the baby and the Host. Women of all colors, backgrounds, and ethnicities are hosts at Golden Oaks, which is not-so-lovingly referred to as The Farm by many of the Hosts.

The story follows four women from vastly different backgrounds. Mae is an American of Asian descent who manages Golden Oaks. Jane is a Filipino immigrant trying to support her daughter. Ate is Jane’s older, Filipino, immigrant cousin who nannies for upper class New York families. Reagan is a young, wealthy, white woman trying to make enough money to support her art career without her father’s money and control. The Farm dives into socioeconomic diversity and driving forces behind poverty, emigration, and choices women make based solely on need.

Ramos fills The Farm with interesting plots and characters. There is a 1984 Big Brother kind of feel to the novel that is simultaneously overtly creepy yet almost comforting. Though, the plot has a happier rather than completely realistic ending, there are very realistic aspects and problems to Golden Oaks that ground the plot in human emotion and complexity. Ramos doesn’t simplify difficult concepts nor does she try to explain them. She tells a story about motivation, poverty, and womanhood allowing the reader to take away what they will.

The quote “Sometimes a person has no choice but hard choices…” is incredibly insightful and the entire point of The Farm. Though simple in concept, it can be hard for people who have never experienced that kind of desperation to understand what women will do when their backs are against a wall looking into the mouth of a hippo.

The Farm is heartbreaking and infuriating. Joanne Ramos’ has quite a literary career ahead of her if this is what she brings to the table with her debut novel.

Memorable Quotes
“But babies are stronger than people think, and smarter.”
“the monumental efforts taken to make Clients feel food about outsourcing their pregnancies.”
“As if being a good girl and being strong willed were in conflict.”

Buy on Amazon | Buy on Barnes & Noble | Buy on Book Depository
Shop the Post
[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3687904″]

Title: The Farm
Author: Joanne Ramos
Publisher: Random House
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781984853752

Books, Fiction

Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang

May 11, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth a Read Maybe
Length 256
Quick Review A collection of short stories exploring family, love, and identity for a generation of Chinese.

Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang | Cherry Shoes

Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang is a collection of incredibly moving short stories oscillating between depressing, funny, tragic, and cringy.

There is a lot going on in this little book. The short stories in Home Remedies are divided up into three sections: Family, Love, Time and Space. The first story does a great job setting the tone of the book. It’s serious and pulls the reader into the book. There is no way you can put the book down once you start reading.

One of the most impactful scenes in the entire book is a scene on page 89. It made me angry, uncomfortable, and feeling a little gross. Good writers don’t shy away from the tough topics, and Wang dove right into the difficult stuff throughout all of Home Remedies. There is never a moment she doesn’t shy away from the human topics. Life is complex and difficult, and Wang captures these moments in her short stories. It focuses on a generation of people in China and Chinese immigrants.

Wang bridges a gap. Giving a voice and story to people who have had very little representation in the Western world. Wang helps define people as human and not by their culture, skin color, or place of birth. Things may be different on the surface, but deep down humans all have similar desires, feelings, and experiences.

Wang’s debut book, Home Remedies, will be available May 14, 2019, and it’s going to make an impression.

Memorable Quotes
“Love could be a burden, too.”
“She was keenly aware of time lines, expiration dates of food, the shelf life of flowering plants, and the appropriateness of behavior at any given age.”

Buy on Amazon | Buy on Book Depository
Shop the Post
[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3578336″]

Title: Home Remedies
Author: Xuan Juliana Wang
Publisher: Hogarth
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781984822741

Books, Fiction

A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua

April 30, 2019April 27, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 304
Quick Review A Chinese woman arrives in the U.S. to give birth to her baby, but due to circumstance stays to make her way in the face of adversity in Vanessa Hua’s A River of Stars.

Reading A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua by the pool. | Dress

Reading books about immigration is important right now. It’s easy to talk about immigrants as a group or an other, but when you’re faced with stories of struggle, despair, children, and the humanity of it all, it’s hard to think of keep them separate from ourselves. The political climate in the U.S. is very …interested in immigration right now. We need these stories. Even though, A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua is a novel, it is very much grounded in reality for millions of men, women, and children living in fear and unknowns here in the U.S. and around the world.

Scarlett is a 37 year old Chinese woman who arrives in the United States to give birth to her bosses baby. She stays at a home for pregnant Chinese women, but it feels more like a prison filled with gossipy, rich ladies. Scarlett runs away with Daisy, a well-off, pregnant, teenage. They end up in San Francisco’s China Town scraping by, giving birth, and figuring it out, while the clock on their tourist visas keeps ticking away. They make friends and learn to lean on one another for help and companionship.

There are four fundamental characters in A River of Stars: Scarlett, Daisy, Boss Yeung, and Mama Fang. Chapters randomly alternate perspective allowing each of these characters to tell their side of the story. It humanizes each of them, and shows their motivations, misunderstandings, feelings, and more. If the story had followed just Scarlett, it would have been vastly different. The immigrant story is not one sided but multifaceted and complicated. Everyone is searching for something, and at the core it is a search for identity and belonging. Hua also makes use of transliterations instead of using just English. The Chinese infusion is a lovely addition to the story because immigration stories usually include a language hurdle. Motherhood is an essential element to this story. Without it, the narrative kind of falls apart. Emigration is often heavily influenced by existing children or future children. Parents want the best for their kids. It’s a fairly fundamental emotion.

Vanessa Hua does a great job of creating an interesting story that is both fun to read and right on the nose for the political climate in her debut novel A River of Stars. It’s perfect for the upcoming summer months.

Memorable Quotes
“Daisy didn’t realize that you might share the same bed, but dream different dreams.”
“She didn’t yet realize aunties specialize in contradictory advice.”

Buy on Amazon | Buy on Book Depository
Shop the Post
[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3562182″]

Title: A River of Stars
Author: Vanessa Hua
Publisher: Ballantine Books (Random House)
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 9780399178788

Books, NonFiction

The Art of Leaving by Ayelet Tsabari

April 20, 2019April 19, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth a Read Yes
Length 336
Quick Review Ayelet Tsabari was born and raised a Yemeni Jew in Israel. The death of her father was a catalyst leading her into a transient lifestyle always leaving for her next “home.”

The Art of Leaving by Ayelet Tsabari | Romper | Black Pumps

The Art of Leaving is an apt title for this moving and sometimes cringe worthy memoir. What can be seen as a memoir about leaving people and places can also be read as a search for belonging, home, and being seen. People yearn to belong to someone, somewhere. Ayelet documents her life of wandering around the United States, loving, gaining citizenship in Canada, roaming Southeast Asia, returning to Israel, becoming a mother. She is not only leaving people and places, she’s leaving herself. The parts she doesn’t like, the parts she doesn’t want in her narrative, the parts that other people have forced upon her. Tsabari yearns to belong in the world and in her own skin.

Tsabari grew up in the Tel Aviv area of Israel. She was the daughter of a beloved lawyer and the second youngest in a large family. At the tender age of ten, her father passed away. She spent her adolescence rebelling and searching for an identity while simultaneously flaunting and avoiding the stereotypes hounding her as a Yemeni and a woman. She joined the army as all Israelis do; instead of being a good soldier, Tsabari pushed all the boundaries and buttons (literally). After completing her time, she left. Exploring life in foreign lands, she did what many young people do: experiment in many ways. At one point landing on a beach in Goa, India, she didn’t even own shoes.

I had no idea about the racism in Israel towards people of Yemeni heritage. The Art of Leaving greatly opened my eyes to a culture and country I know very little of. The plight of Yemenis in Israel is reminiscent of the treatment of blacks in the United States; different, of course, but similar. Tsabari references childhood bomb shelters and gas masks like they were as every day as an ice cream and a swing set. Maybe, they were.

Tsabari touches briefly on the irony of her very Jewish urge to wander and find a home when her home is Israel in The Art of Leaving. Jewish people wandered for centuries searching for a place to call home with no success. She wanders with the same yearning of her ancestors. She looks for a home for her body and a home for her soul.

In Chicago’s Little Italy | The Art of Leaving | Romper | Pumps

I loved how Tsabari writes her memoir. It is very much in the present even though the events are in the past. The syntax and tense pull the reader into her life, identity, and crisis of being. There is a transparency between herself and the reader. She has no qualms about looking back into her diary and stating she wrote a story she could live with. Human. Reshaping stories and lives to fit in a pretty box. Her narrative was not the only narrative reshaped with years and in memories. Her great-grandmother was demonized and hated. Life is rarely as simple as walking away. Life and stories are complex and layered. Many of Tsabari’s life choices are questionable at best and downright stupid at worst. That’s the point. We all make choices in moments without thinking or ignoring what should be done. Tsabari took her own path and doesn’t apologize for it. I always admire the unapologetic even when I want to save them from their mistakes, which you can’t do. Saving people doesn’t really exist.

The Art of Leaving is a very personal, unique, and beautiful memoir. Even though she grew up under very unique circumstances, her story is very relatable. Many people wander with the need to find home.

Plot hole question: What happened to your feet??? I need to know!

Buy on Amazon || Buy on Book Depository
Shop the Post
[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3549014″]

Memorable Quotes
“…they are proof that you don’t have to stop traveling to grow up.”
“Leaving is the only thing I know how to do.”
“Stories to her were luxuries, like dreams and regret.”
“I never feel that much anymore, which I suppose is the trade-off for not falling apart.”
“I didn’t want to become someone else. I wanted to be me.” (Motherhood)

Title: The Art of Leaving
Author: Ayelet Tsabari
Publisher: Random House
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780812988987

Books, NonFiction

Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev

April 16, 2019April 15, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 288
Quick Review A meandering memoir. Shalmiyev talks about the dark side of growing up with an alcoholic mother and the scars that never go away.

*Mother Winter* by Sophia Shalmiyev | Jeans | Sandals | Shirt | Sweater

Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev is one of the most interesting memoirs I have ever read, and I have read a lot. I’m drawn to memoirs because life isn’t defined by a single event or truth but the culmination of all experiences. Everyone has their own ever evolving truth, and memoirs are a beautiful exploration of that. Sophia Shalmiyev looks back at her life and how so much of it was affected by her alcoholic mother even after leaving the country and starting a new life.

Mother Winter reads like poetry. It doesn’t necessarily make sense at first, but in its entirety, it is a beautiful story. Shalmiyev was born in Russia during the communist years. Her parents divorced, and her father raised her due to her mother being an alcoholic and unfit to parent. Even so, Shalmiyev never stopped looking, thinking, or yearning for the mother she lost. In her youth, she left the USSR to make a home in the United States.

I speak Russian. I have a fairly vast knowledge of the history, literature, and culture because I studied it in college. For me, the language and culture was very accessible. It’s interesting to know the history of a country and government juxtaposed against the personal experience of a young girl. I love how Shalmiyev transliterated some Russian words instead of translating them; it granted a more insight into the culture.

The prose in Mother Winter is not straight forward. The chapters weave and jump, backtracking and side-stepping. It is a very complicated organizational system, which could have failed miserably, but instead it is the perfect fit. The reader gets lost and regains themselves in the text, in a way similar to Shalmiyev felt, I can only imagine, as a child in Russia between homes and again as a young immigrant in America. Discombobulated in the best of ways. I love how eloquent and transcendent her prose is; then, suddenly there is a bluntness to her sentence where there is no room for misinterpretation. On of my favorite passages can be found on page 46 and 47. Shalmiyev cuts through the bullshit.

She weaves USSR history into her life giving the reader context and understanding of what she went through. She blends history, science, feelings, memories, anecdotes, adjective strings, third person narration, quotes, directives to her mother, and so much more. The amount of knowledge Shalmiyev includes extends from literature, medicine, philosophy, science, and history – I probably missed some.

Mother Winter is an absolute joy to read. I loved it from a personal stance because of the Russian component, but it is also the story of a mother and a woman surviving. I absolutely cannot recommend this book more.

Memorable Quotes
“Yesterday has never ended.”
“a book like Henry and June roasted my throat with the fear that tough and smart doesn’t protect you from subservient and used up.”
“Goods are damaged often by no fault of their own.”

Buy on Amazon | Buy on Book Depository
Shop the Post
[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3548770″]

Title: Mother Winter
Author: Sophia Shalmiyev
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781501193088

Books, Fiction

The Veins of the Ocean

May 26, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Difficulty: II
Length: III
Genre: Fiction – Novel
Quick Review: A young Colombian woman struggles with finding herself amid healing from a life burdened with tragedy and guilt as an immigrant, daughter, sister, and woman.

Patricia Engel is an award winning author, and she doesn’t disappoint in her novel The Veins of the Ocean. A beautiful novel about a young woman who emigrated from Colombia to Miami as an infant with her family. Mere months later, a tragedy strikes her family, which changes her future forever. Engel captured my attention within the first page with her dark yet enchanting style and content. The first chapter is stunning while setting the mood with a unique cadence, style, language, and enough clues to let you know you’re in for a story about gender inequity, culture, family, and so much more.

Reina is in her mid twenties. Her brother Carlito is on death row. Her life has been nothing but reactions to one tragedy after another. She struggles with being a daughter in a traditional latino family, where her brother received all the attention and praise. When there is nothing left for her, she picks up her life in Miami to start a fresh in the Florida Keys. Along the way, Reina grieves and finds love, passion, acceptance, and forgiveness.

It’s hard to describe the depths Engel reaches in her novel. She explores sexism, immigration, communism, religion, grief, the prison system, ecosystem, guilt, sexual assault, and so much more. The characters are beautiful and flawed and relatable. Dealing with Colombian and Cuban characters, Engel brings cultures seldomly discussed.

There are seven parts comprised of many chapters, which vary in length. Along with the compelling narrative, the chapter lengths make you say “just one more chapter; it’s only two pages,” and next thing you know, you’ve read fifty more pages. The story is beyond compelling, and I finished the novel in a day because it was so interesting. It’s beyond quotable about love and pain and loyalty. Engel draws beautiful parallels between life surrounding the characters and their own.

One of the things I enjoyed most about The Veins of the Ocean was the lack of dialogue. The vast majority of the story is Reina looking backward and her thoughts on the present. It’s a stunning look into the mind of someone coping with pain. For me, I found it relatable. I think most people can relate to working through grief and guilt. There’s a unique cadence to the language that is so engaging.

Memorable Quotes:
“It’s good for you to dream about things that will probably never happen.”
“We thought it hysterical that there is an industry of artificial horror when real life is so much more lethal.”
“Making friends with danger is the only way to survive.”
“… the love of a mother is not unconditional or eternal the way they say.”
“I am mourning my sadness.”

Title: The Veins of the Ocean
Author: Patricia Engel
Publisher: Grove Press
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9780802126740