Starred review from August 11, 2014
Growing up in the 1970s in a Cuban-American community in Miami, poet Blanco was besieged by his exiled relatives’ nostalgia for the life they had left behind in Cuba in the 1960s; yet he also yearned for a American identity free from the immigrant experience. In seven chapters Blanco moves through the milestones of his adolescence living with his mother, father, older brother, Carlos (“Caco”), and grandparents, specifically his overbearing abuela, who had saved enough money working as a bookie in New York City for the family to move to a new house with a terra-cotta roof and lawn in the Westchester suburb of Miami—pronounced “Guechesta.” In the first chapter, “The First Real San Giving Day,” young Ricardo accompanied his abuela to help buy the chicken specials at the Winn-Dixie, a gringo store she highly suspected (“We don’t belong here”); yet her grandson gradually won her over to the American selections such as Easy Cheese and even engineered a Thanksgiving feast for the family that was as foreign as it was instructive. Being chosen as the companion for lovely Deycita’s quinceañera ball made Blanco, however, begin to wonder whether he liked girls at all, confirmed by his first dreamy crush on the former Cuban prisoner and new hire at the bodega where he worked for many summers, El Cocuyito (“The Firefly”). Blanco has a natural, unforced style that allows his characters’ vibrancy and humor to shine through.
September 15, 2014
When Blanco was named America's fifth Inaugural poet, he became the first Latino and openly gay man to be so honored. Now, in his memoir of growing up in Miami, he writes of his search for a place where he belonged. Conceived in Cuba, born in Spain, and raised in Miami, he felt rootless as he grew up watching reruns of I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, and Bewitched while dreaming of having a real American family. He persuades his bewildered relatives to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, with unfortunate results. He finds an unlikely soul mate in an elderly Jewish woman who, like him, is a little from everywhere. He gets a job working in his great uncle's market, a place that comes to seem like home until a new man is hired with whom he falls in love and is forced to accept that he is gay, another outsider condition of being. Filled with colorful characters, often poignant and sometimes melancholy, Blanco's episodic memoir is a meditation on belonging, on self-acceptance, and on his family's almost mystical connection to Cuba.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)