A heartfelt family drama about a family and their neighborhood. This is a lovely debut novel that I enjoyed very much. It is set in New York, so of course I wanted to read this, and the premise was very creative. A neighborhood tenet is told to either buy their units or take a buyout, and an elder of the community, Eusebia Guerrero, takes matters into her own hands via dangerous methods. Her daughter Luz is a rising attorney in a prominent law firm, and she is trying to maintain a lifestyle her parents worked hard to give her. She gets distracted by a romance with a white developer that works at the company her mother opposes. I enjoyed how both Eusebia and Luz worked through their issues, both personally and with each other, and while it did get a little extreme at times, overall this was a very well done debut.

I listened to this via audio and the narrators did a wonderful job, I was very glad I read it this way.

Thank you to Random House and PRH Audio for the copies to review.

"Neruda on the Park" is a debut novel that seeks to capture the complexities of family dynamics, ambition, and the impact of encroaching gentrification. 

The novel shines in its portrayal of community bonds and the complexities of pursuing dreams in a changing urban landscape. The author's ability to depict the nuances of cultural identity and the impact of gentrification on marginalized communities is commendable, making the story feel incredibly relevant and timely.

On the downside, its narrative is a bit scattered, with multiple storylines vying for attention. While the depth of character development is a strength, it can, at times, make the story feel somewhat disjointed and difficult to fully immerse oneself in.

"Neruda on the Park" is a thought-provoking and emotionally charged tale that tugs at the heartstrings while shedding light on the challenges faced by communities in the midst of gentrification. Although it may have some scattered moments that hinder complete captivation, this novel is a worthy addition to your reading list if you enjoy richly woven stories of love, family, and cultural identity,

Loved this emotional coming into your own style family drama wrapped up in the struggles of a quickly gentrifying city. Natera paints a beautiful picture of a complicated family filled with love but also shame, obligation, secrets and mistrust. All families are complicated and Neruda on the Park really showcases the complicated dynamics that pull us in so many directions in the name of family and love in the complicated landscape of modern cities. Natera's use of gentrification as a central conflict fits seamlessly into the story without hitting the read over the head with obvious and pandering explanations of what's happening and why it's bad. 

Heartfelt while also sharp and so well written I's highly recommend this book.

At about 20% I thought I would give up, but hung in there. At 50%, I was hooked, but by then I noticed that the satellite stories were a detraction from the overarching story of a woman saving her neighborhood from gentrification.

Transformation is certainly a theme in this text. People transform, desires transform, communities transform.
Natera tackles poverty, brain drain from a community, the myth of the American dream, colorism, and that fraught landscape where the battles between mothers and daughters rage.

In the end Eusebia's sacrifice is her own daughter, but in doing so, the community is saved.

Eusebia and Vladimir come to New York City from the Dominican Republic and their daughter, Luz, is a lawyer. The building next door is being demolished to make room for some upscale condos and then their building is turning into condos. Eusebia tries to fight back and it got strange. Then Luz is let go from her job and deciding what she wants to do.

I liked Vladimir but I didn't care for Luz or Eusebia. Eusebia felt that Luz was too good to cook and clean so Luz pretty much lived at home and was waited on. She was broke because she gave most of her paycheck and savings to her Dad who was building, in secret, a dream home to retire back home in the Dominican Republic. I didn't understand the relationships and wished for more development in the characters and the story.

This is a debut novel and I feel the author has a lot of potential and would love to read her future books.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Ballantine for providing me with a digital copy.

🏞️𝙱𝙾𝙾𝙺 𝚁𝙴𝚅𝙸𝙴𝚆🏞️

Neruda on the park - Cleyvis Natera 
⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Let us grow rooted in the love of all our homes, let us rejoice in our strength and never shy away from it, let our stories change the world with the power and beauty of our imagination.”

For almost twenty years the Guerrero family has lived in Northar Park, a predominant Dominican part of New York City.  The story, told from two points of view, The daughter, Luz and her mother, Eusebia. When a high rise development is being built in the neighborhood, Eusebia creates a plan to stop the construction of luxury condos.  Luz, on the other hand, starts a romance with a developer from the company trying to build the condos. 
How will Luz's new romance with the wealthy developer affect her future and her family life?

This is the first time I can't connect with the characters in a story, I feel like their behaviors were inconsistent and unpredictable, and I just couldn't feel the story like I usually do. I did enjoy the description of the food and the music, I believe this felt realistic and authentic.  I really wanted to love the story but I just couldn't. 

Thanks to Ballantine books & @netgalley for the ARC.

#bookstagram #bookstagrammer #netgalley #arcreader #arcreviewer #nerudainthepark

Where is home? This is what is explored in this book. I was surprised by how engaged I became in this book. I thought it felt disjointed at first but it all came together.

This book is everything I thought it would be. It was such a beautifully told story with heartbreak and raw human emotion. 

I'll definitely be recommending this one to everybody that I know.

On the very first page of Neruda on the Park, debut author Cleyvis Natera drops readers into the boom and crash of a demolition. Fractured brownstone, shattered glass. A wrecking ball, mid-swing. Change is coming to the fictional, predominantly-Dominican neighborhood of Nothar Park. An aged tenement building being torn down in New York City is a telltale sign that gentrification will soon sweep in. But is it a threat? It depends on who you ask.

Ask Eusebia Guerrero, an elder in the community, and she’d likely tell you the world is ending. She receives each construction blow in horror. With growing distress, she asks herself more than once, “How to fix this mess?”

Or ask Luz Guerrero, Eusebia’s daughter. A rising associate at a top Manhattan law firm, Luz seems ambivalent about her neighborhood being at the cusp of gentrification. She never felt like she belonged there, anyway.

“When they first arrived in this country, Eusebia had insisted Luz not forget their true home had been left behind, that this new place, with its hard ground and impossible language, was hostile,” Natera writes. “But over time, Eusebia had created an entire new world in it. Listening to her now, Luz marveled at the change, wondering exactly what it was about this place that had won her mother over.”

Luz claims to know how her neighborhood’s story ends – with change, yes, and yoga and endless mimosa brunch spots. But with Neruda on the Park, out on May 24, readers have no idea how this story will end, or could end, or should end. Natera brings us an intricate novel about a Dominican mother and daughter who step into markedly different paths when faced with gentrification. Fueled by anger and the fear of her community’s displacement, Eusebia concocts a crime ring to try to stop the luxury condo building from going up. And Luz – freshly-fired from her firm – finds herself in a sizzling romance with the white developer of the company her mother fervently opposes. This is a story about family, sacrifice, loyalty, the meaning of home, and how far one is willing to go to protect it. 

Natera, herself born in the Dominican Republic before migrating to the United States at ten years old, wrote Neruda on the Park over the course of fifteen years. That she tended to this story for so long is evident by her gorgeous prose, the novel’s myriad of characters and the ways their lives interconnect, and the many pressures she layers onto Eusebia and Luz. In the background, we sympathize with Eusebia’s husband, Vladimir, who has been secretly plotting with Luz to build a dream home back in the Dominican Republic. His job as a police detective has worn him down, but he maintains a determined eye on retirement.

At the heart of the novel is Luz and Eusebia, and the ways in which their relationship is challenged and reshaped as a result of this looming threat in the shape of concrete beams. The chapters alternate between their points of view, giving us an intimate look at their internal struggles and the growing rift between them when Eusebia finds out Luz is dating the man behind the development. 

On the page, Natera takes extra care in breathing life into the women. In Eusebia, for example, I saw a hard-working Dominican mother who prides herself in putting her daughter and husband first – at the detriment of herself. There’s no better demonstration of this than our introduction to Eusebia in the second chapter. Natera opens up with Eusebia making breakfast for Luz and Vladimir. She starts by setting the greca on the stove, then sliding pieces of bread into the toaster. Then, Natera writes: “Removed eggs from the refrigerator and put three in a small pot filled with water for Luz, who would only eat the egg whites, and left three on the side for Vladimir, who would only eat his fried over hard. Vladimir’s eggs needed to reach room temperature before she dropped them in the pan. Later, she’d place each fried egg on top of the not-too-toasted bread.”

It’s not a far stretch to say that Eusebia’s caretaker role brings a bit of discomfort to the reader, and it’s clear early on that there’s a codependency between mother and daughter. Eusebia loves her family, and that love will push her to take drastic action. 

To make her crime spree happen, Eusebia enlists the help of The Tongues – her bingo-playing triplet friends who are also community fixtures in Nothar Park. “What if we just scare everyone into thinking this neighborhood is really bad?” she asks them. The women come up with a list of fake crimes and promptly get to work.

In Neruda, Natera does an effective job at making you care for not only Eusebia, Luz, and Vladimir, but for the rest of the cast. One of the most delightful parts of the book, for example, are the carefully crafted interludes by The Tongues. There’s one that made me literally laugh out loud, in which the triplets described the sheer ridiculousness of one of the fake crimes gone wrong. Their short chapters are a welcome respite from the escalating drama and tension between Eusebia and Luz. We also grow concerned for the future of Angélica, Luz’s childhood best friend and a mother of twins whose family is likely to get pushed out by gentrification. And then there’s Cuca, Eusebia’s sister, who traveled to the Dominican Republic for a full-body cosmetic renovation to keep her husband from cheating on her again. These additional characters provide a richer portrait of a community of people with individual struggles and hopes.

As I read chapter after chapter – and as the story marched along – I found myself feeling on edge. I wondered how far Eusebia would take her plan. Who else would get hurt? And, most critically, how would this affect the already strained relationship between mother and daughter? Will mother and daughter get back to how they were before, or will their dynamic be irrevocably changed by the story’s dramatic climax?

After finishing Neruda on the Park, Eusebia and Luz lingered in my mind for days. I thought about what home is, and how it can hold different meanings for people – even members of the same family. I was also left with so much gratitude to Natera for not giving up on her book – a story told with so much love and care for a community of immigrants and their children, and the life they’ve managed to stitch together in the face of so many obstacles.

The Guerreros live together in the Nothar Park neighborhood of the city which is about to undergo gentrification with the tearing down of an abandoned building to make room for luxury condos. And, even more confounding to them and their neighbors, they receive notification that their own building where they've lived for twenty years, will soon be converted to condos.  Luz Guerrero is an up and coming lawyer working for a Manhattan law firm, fully expecting to be given news of a promotion when she meets her boss for breakfast at a fancy restaurant...but instead she is shocked to be told she is going to be let go.   The story alternates between Luz and Eusebia's perspectives which works well for this story of two such different women. Natera vividly brings that whole unique Dominican neighborhood to life with her many eccentric characters and their hopes, dreams and worries. An entertaining story of strained but loving relationships.  The character development in the novel seems choppy. We never really understand Luz's motivations and many of the events seem disjointed, particularly towards the end in regards to Luz and Hudson's relationship. Eusebia's plan to save the neighborhood happens with the buy-in of many of their building's residents, but there is no indication why some of them make these life-altering choices. The only constant character is Vladimir, Luz's father and Eusebia's husband. His focus is on retiring from the NYPD to the Dominican Republic and building a house for him and Eusebia to spend their days.  I just continued to wonder while reading when something was going to happen to complete some of the many threads in this book that do not seem to align with each other, it felt very disjointed and not a cohesive story.  I really wanted to like it but due to these reasons it fell flat.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Random House-Ballantine, and Cleyvis Natera for an ARC

This book has a very moving plot. This book is a good look into a family that is fraught and has intense dynamics. It is also a portrait of NY and a side that you don't see in NYC. I think many people would enjoy reading this book.

I enjoyed this book. I felt it went from one thing to another quickly, that is why I gave it a 4 star. Besides that, it was interesting. I would still recommend this book!

I really enjoyed the beginning of this novel and thought it had so much promise. Unfortunately, it could not keep my attention and seemed to go all over the place, and I was diverted down a million side alleys I didn’t enjoy heading down. Ultimately it wasn’t my cup of tea. I couldn’t relate to the characters, and they didn’t feel like real people to me. The middle went on forever and final I was forced to quit reading it. 

I was given a complimentary copy of the digital ARC by the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

I love books with strongs themes surrounding gentrification. I enjoyed this nicely crafted book! It raises many questions and would be an ideal choice for a book club as well as personal reading. Thanks to Penguin Random House for alloing me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review.

A mesmerizing account of a community impacted by gentrification, and policies that disproportionately impact immigrant communities in ways that challenge upward mobility, access & inclusion. It’s a story about family,  friendship, identity and making your own way in the world.

This book was much more than I expected. A book that is so poignant for what is going on in the world and how it is effecting the people in it. While I don't live in an area where I am trying to be forced out of my home, I have family who are in areas where it could soon be coming. I was able to relate to both Luz and Eusebia in how they approached the issue in their own way.

But additionally, I could fully relate to Luz and her need/obligation to do what her parents thought was best for her. While my mother has never said the things that Eusebia said to Luz, doing better than most and working hard was something that was just expected of me. And I have had the same struggles as Luz deciding if my prestigious job is what I really want to do. 

This was such a great book, everyone should read it.

Nothing about this book went where I expected it to, but I ended up really enjoying it. The author is great at creating a strong sense of place, and I enjoyed the multi POV. It was just very well done! 

The middle of the book dragged a bit, and the ending turned a little cheesy to me. But overall, the themes, characters, and general atmosphere had me hooked.

Recommended for literary fiction readers and fans of family dramas/stories of finding your path.

I love that this story is not just about a family, but about the community. It is such a richer experience that the entire world is brought in to describe this family.

I enjoyed reading this book it was an interesting journey to follow with the family members and the different paths they took. It got me thinking about how and what our parents want of us sometimes is not what we want for ourselves.

I unfortunately never got through this book. I enjoyed it but never enough to just sit and keep reading.