Speak to Me of Home: A Novel

by Jeanine Cummins

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A story of mothers and daughters, family secrets and finding home. With a large and lively cast of characters, all bringing something different to the page, this is heartfelt and original.

What does it mean to call a place home?

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeanine Cummins comes a deeply felt multigenerational family story

On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments.

In the 1980s, against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth, wants only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. It’s not until decades later when Ruth’s own daughter, Daisy, returns to San Juan that her mother and grandmother begin to truly reflect on the choices that have come to define their lives.

When a hurricane ravages the island in 2023, leaving Daisy critically injured, Rafaela and Ruth return to the city where their story began. As they gather at Daisy’s bedside, we follow them back into the moments that brought them to this point: We watch as they come of age, fall in love, take risks, and contend with all the heartbreaks, triumphs, and reversals of fortune—both good and bad—that make up a meaningful life. As old memories come to light, so do buried secrets, leaving everyone in the family wondering exactly where it is that they belong.

A striking, resonant examination of marriage, family, and identity, Speak to Me of Home is ultimately a story of mothers and daughters that asks: How can three women who share geography and genetics have such wildly different ideas of where they come from? And, more important, can they discover a common language to find their way back home?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250759368
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/13/2025
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jeanine Cummins is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of American Dirt, which was an Oprah’s Book Club and a Barnes & Noble Book Club selection, as well as a #1 Indie Next pick. The novel has been translated into thirty-seven languages and sold more than three and a half million copies worldwide. Her other works include the memoir A Rip in Heaven, and the novels The Outside Boy and The Crooked Branch. She lives in New York with her husband, their two daughters, and their dogs.

Editorial Reviews

03/03/2025

Cummins (American Dirt) serves up an engrossing if occasionally cloying family drama. In 2023 Palisades, N.Y., Ruth Hayes receives a phone call from a hospital in Puerto Rico. Her daughter, Daisy, who recently left college over Ruth’s objections and moved to the island, has been hit by a car. From there, the narrative rewinds to San Juan in 1968, as Daisy’s maternal grandmother, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón, prepares to marry her Irish American fiancé, Peter, despite his parents’ misgivings. Later, when Peter moves his wife and two small kids back to his native Missouri, the cracks in their marriage deepen. Cummins devotes later sections to Ruth, both as a child in St. Louis watching her mother struggle and as an adult, mystified by her own three children. When her youngest, born Charlie Hayes, decides to change his name to Carlos Hayes-Acuña, Ruth feels “a tiny flare of anger... what right did Charlie have to try on as if it were a costume?” Despite some melodramatic moments and convoluted twists, Cummins succeeds at breathing life into her large cast of characters and excels at depicting the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship. This is worth a look. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2025-03-22
Three generations navigate familial relationships and one big family secret.

Rafaela grows up in a palatial house in San Juan, but when her father loses his powerful job in disgrace, she has to leave school and work as a secretary on a military base. When she and her husband move their family to Missouri, their daughter, Ruth, assimilates much more easily than her brother. Ruth’s daughter, Daisy, rejects the upper-middle-class life her mother creates for her in a suburb half an hour away from Manhattan, choosing instead to manage her uncle’s rental properties in Puerto Rico. This novel tells the stories of all three women, shifting in time from the 1950s to the present day. Cummins’ previous novel,American Dirt(2020), was a bestseller, but some critics complained that the author seemed to be writing about Mexican migrants as an outsider looking in. Her depictions of Puerto Rican culture and the lives of her migrant characters here are occasionally more nuanced—colorism and class play significant roles in the plot—but Cummins still indulges in tired tropes. For example, Rafaela’s mother is a black-haired beauty from the countryside who shimmies her hips and claps back at the patrician women who snub her. And the Puerto Rico that Daisy experiences never quite feels like an actual place. On her first visit to her grandmother’s birthplace, Daisy falls in love with Puerto Rico because it’s “just foreign enough to be an adventure and still familiar enough to feel like home.” This would read less like the tagline on a travel brochure if the move from the American suburbs to San Juan had any discernible impact on her as a person. She does almost die in a hurricane, but a natural disaster is not character development. Indeed, none of the characters here emerge as real people. Even the dramatic revelation that animates the novel’s final act fails to provoke much in the way of conflict or change.

Flat characters and cultural cliches make for a disappointing read.

Kirkus Reviews

A fine novel. . . . Daisy’s sections are the heart of the novel, dipping into magical realism as her spirit navigates the border between life and death and brings the family to her bedside with triumphant and transcendent love. This commendable return for Cummins comes with a surprise cherry-on-top twist.”

—Booklist

“Engrossing. . . . Cummins succeeds at breathing life into her large cast of characters and excels at depicting the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[A] moving novel.”

—AARP, “Spring’s Top Reads”

“Jeanine Cummins’ Speak To Me Of Home is a masterful love letter to our shared homeland of Puerto Rico, the global diaspora, and every American. Once again, Cummins surveys the depths of the immigrant experience and compassionately examines the push and pull between our individual identity and our ancestral ties. Through three generations of Boricua women, the novel powerfully demonstrates that the greatest inheritance we can pass on is a courageous heart willing to adapt. Speak To Me Of Home is an epic must-read!”

—Sarah McCoy, New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?

“Jeanine Cummins’ new novel is a beautiful, tender, complex story of origin, displacement, identity, and belonging. Poetically written and brimming with heart, Speak to Me of Home tells of a family’s yearning, through the generations, to find the roots that truly anchor them, the land that calls them home. A most moving and meaningful read.”

—Jennifer Rosner, award-winning author of Once We Were Home and The Yellow Bird Sings

From the Publisher