Dominicana
Angie Cruz

Set in Washington Heights, Manhattan in the 1960s, when Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy were assassinated, and protestors fought to end Jim Crow and the Vietnam War, 15-year-old Ana Canción arrives in New York from the Dominican Republic newly married to a man twice her age in efforts to help her family immigrate to the United States and leave their progressively unstable country behind.

Ana’s burden of her mother’s demands, a husband she does not love, and a foreign land make Dominicana a particularly heart wrenching coming of age story. Plucked from her childhood and brought into circumstances beyond her control, Angie Cruz carefully takes us through Ana’s heartache and reality. Each character has their influence on Ana, but no one more than Washington Heights itself. The Heights becomes its own living and breathing character that interacts and changes with Ana as she buds from the concrete, giving us a full picture of what it was like in New York for an immigrant in the 60s.

An important novel for our time, Dominicana is beautifully written with a spellbound lead in Ana that leaves us hopeful when her story seems anything but.

Angie Cruz was born and raised in the Washington Heights section of New York City. She is a graduate of SUNY Binghamton and received her MFA from New York University. Her fiction and activist work have earned her the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award, and the Bronx Writers' Center Van Lier Literary Fellowship. Cruz lives in New York City. Visit the author at www.angiecruz.com. Dominicana was inspired by her mother’s arrival story. 

Dominicana is publication by Flatiron Books. Expected release date is September 3. Click here to pre-order.
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Reviewed by
Harmony Trevino​
​8/7/2019

Harmony Trevino is a writer and voracious reader of books. She started her education in journalism, and ventured into nonprofit communications. Harmony eventually went to work at TOMS Shoes for five years supporting their philanthropy efforts. She currently resides in Tennessee.

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