Review: Make Your Home Among Strangers

Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jennine Capó Crucet is the O. Henry Award and John Gardner Book Award-winning author of “Make Your Home Among Strangers.” Published in 2015, this book caught my attention about a week ago when students tore up and burned copies of the book after Crucet spoke about white privilege at Georgia Southern University. Protests grew heated enough on the campus that her hosts felt it prudent to move her to a hotel several towns away, presumably for her safety. As Ray Bradbury taught us, book burning is a fascist tactic that suppresses freedom of speech and difference of opinion. So I was determined to read and review the book. Let me say up front that I’m half-Latina (Spanish and Cuban roots on that side of the family), and from Miami. While I didn’t live in the Hialeah and Little Havana neighborhoods that Crucet describes, I know them well.

“Make Your Home Among Strangers” is the story of Lizet Ramirez’s freshman year at the fictional Rawlings College, which sounds a lot like Vassar, a prestigious liberal arts college in New York State. Lizet gains entry after applying in secret, forging parental signatures, and obtaining a lot of financial aid due to her family’s financial circumstances and ethnicity. Her family doesn’t take her admission well. More on that later.

While Liz was an academic achiever at the also-fictional Hialeah Lakes Senior High School (I would note there is a Hialeah-Miami Lakes SHS), it’s plain from the opening of the book, in which Liz is being investigated for plagiarism, that the deans of Rawlings College aren’t too sure the Admissions Office made the right decision with Liz. It is obvious they think her academic struggles, lack of exposure to an honor code, or even how to correctly cite works in her paper in question, all spell potential disaster. Still, amazingly, she thinks, they’re willing to give her a second chance. If only things were that easy in other areas of Liz’s life.

Lizet's home life has been shattered by her father’s leaving their mother (and somehow blaming it in part on Lizet). He vengefully sells the family’s Hialeah home, which was deeded solely in his name. (Life lesson, one of many...) Liz’s parents married after her mother got pregnant with her older sister Leidy in high school. Neither of her parents finished high school. To add to the family’s current stress, her sister Leidy got pregnant with her boyfriend, Roly. She deliberately stopped taking her birth control pills when she graduated high school, hoping to force Roly into marrying her, as she thinks her dad did with her mom. Only Roly doesn’t roll, and Leidy is raising her son Dante by herself, adding to the family’s financial stress. On top of it all, her mother becomes embroiled with the situation with a little Cuban boy, Ariel Hernandez (a clear reference to Elián González) whose mother died trying to reach America with him. With local and national news covering the saga of the child and his Miami cousins seeking a path to citizenship for him, her mother’s vocal and all-consuming political activism for Ariel strains the family and puts her job at risk. In the midst of this chaos, Lizet’s determination to attend a swanky college in NY state is considered a betrayal by her family. Even her boyfriend Omar is openly ambivalent about her decision to better herself.

Crucet gives the reader a sense of a Latina minority experience in a mostly white school, where Lizet often feels like she’s regarded as an exotic creature on display for her teachers, classmates, and roommate. (A professor seems to think she was born knowing all about magical realism by virtue of her heritage, as one of many examples.) With a three percent Hispanic student population and four percent black population, persons of color are a pronounced minority at Rawlings. Yet there is also an economic minority at the school- students who there on large amounts of financial aid, as we see with her white friend, Ethan. (Lizet is a double minority in this respect.)

With all the Ariel hoopla, it's only a matter of time until Lizet feels the friction of her peers’ perceptions of Cuban-Americans, Cuba, and communism. She feels equal parts deeply embarrassed by her mother’s very public actions, and sure that most Americans simply don’t understand what life in communist Cuba is like. Sometimes she feels as if she is too brown before Ariel’s plight becomes national news, yet later she is treated like she is too white to have a respected opinion about life in Cuba. In a painful scene in which she argues with girls in her dorm, the reader feels the full impact of the alienating attitude of some of her peers. Sadly, the situation with her family is equally challenging. It even risks derailing an internship opportunity that could change the course of her life. Essentially, we often see Lizet torn apart by the differences between Hialeah Lizet and New York Liz. How will she find a path that honors both her roots and her aspirations?

It’s easy to understand why a college or university would find this novel an excellent selection for freshman diversity reading. While I wasn’t there to hear the tone of Crucet’s lecture, I am absolutely certain that burning her book isn’t a proper method of civil discourse on the issue of white privilege shown in this novel or in her latest book, My Time Among the Whites. I hope that Georgia Southern finds a way to put this situation right. I, like Crucet, imagine that students who loved and identified with the book were crushed to see it burned in anger.

I listened to the audiobook, which is beautifully narrated by Marisol Ramirez.

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