I loved this multigenerational story of a Puerto Rican family told through the lens of three women: the matriarch, Rafaella, who marries Peter in 1968, despite misgivings. They move to St. Louis, Missouri in the 80s. Their daughter Ruth struggles to fit in at her new school and strives to find her footing, in the process giving up her connections to Puerto Rico. In 2023 Ruth’s daughter Daisy decides to return to Puerto Rico and is critically injured in a tragic accident.
I loved the humor expertly woven into the characters stories. I loved the tragedy that highlighted what really mattered. I loved the relationships, particularly between the mother Ruth and the daughter Daisy. And I loved learning about their challenges living in different cultures and the prejudice experienced in these 3 timelines that are so visceral you feel like you’re experiencing it with them. This was a beautifully written and thoroughly enjoyed book.

3.5
I enjoyed the narration of this multi-generational Puerto Rican/Irish American family. Each of the POVs appealed to me on their own, but it was distracting to have the book scramble back and forth across the timeline. Just when you’d get into one part of the story, it would jump forward or back to another place and time. I know lots of people enjoy the piecemeal nature of contemporary storytelling but I feel like it’s overdone.

SPEAK TO ME OF HOME by Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt) is worth a read, but beware that the story is told out of sequence and from multiple viewpoints. The focus is on the lives of a Puerto Rican-Irish family across four generations from the 1950s to present day. The patriarch, Papamio loses his job in disgrace and the family is forced to modify its lavish lifestyle, with daughter Rafaela (Rafa) leaving private school and becoming a secretary on a Naval base. There, she meets her future husband, a white Irish Catholic, choosing security over her romantic interest in the son of the family's former housekeeper. After several years of marriage (and accompanying tension) Rafa and Peter Brennan move to the States with their two children, Benny and Ruth. Benny is older and struggles to acclimate, but Ruth establishes friendships and begins speaking only English, thinking of herself as white. As an adult, Ruth also has a choice between a Puerto Rican man and an Irish one. Eventually she raises three children, Vic, Daisy, and Carlos, largely on her own. Ruth "wanted them to feel the kind of belonging she had always learned for and could never achieve. But she hadn't told them that. She had never explained." The family members struggle with questions of class, ethnicity, and where to call home with Daisy moving to Puerto Rico where she is seriously injured in a storm, prompting a family reunion and revelation of a long-suspected secret. Book groups may enjoy this title, especially the emphasis on mother-daughter relationships.

I was hooked at the first sentence when Ruth a call that's every parents worst nightmare. The story shifts between three generations of women in Puerto Rico and the United States slowly revealing family secrets and information about Ruth’s daughter in present day. There is romance, family drama and themes on immigration, belonging and racism. I highly recommend this book!

How is this book not everywhere? Cummins latest had its fair share of commentary, but she is worth another chance here. I was on the edge of my seat and deeply moved.

Speak to Me of Home was an interesting read. I liked the character exploration and the writing felt propulsive.

Speak to Me of Home is a well-written and moving multi-linear, multi-generational novel. Cummins dissects the lives of three generation of Puerto Rican women - Rafaela, Ruth, and Daisy - each of whom must confront issues of race, class and identity. The novel starts a bit slow and the non-linear structure takes some getting used to but then it picks up steam as all the story lines converge and characters learn things about each other and others that had been previously unacknowledged or unknown. Thank you to Henry Holt & Co and NetGalley for the DRC.

🇵🇷🌺🎧AUDIOBOOK REVIEW🎧🌺🇵🇷

⭐⭐⭐⭐✨

🥰Huge thank you to @macmillan.audio and @henryholtbooks for the gifted audiobook and book! #macaudio2025

📖Title: Speak To Me of Home
✍️Author: Jeanine Cummins
📅Pub date: May 13, 2025
🗣️Narrator: Almarie Guerra
⏳Audiobook length: 15hrs, 27mins

🌺This book had me Googling flight prices to Puerto Rico!

🇵🇷At its heart, this is a multi-generational family drama full of secrets and questions regarding identity and how it shapes us. I am ALWAYS looking for a good family drama and love when there's even a deeper underlying theme, so this was totally for me!

🌺From the very first chapter, I was deeply invested in these characters. I don't know how Jeanine Cummins managed to captivate me so quickly and keep my attention locked in for the full 15.5 hours, but I never wanted to put this down.

🇵🇷The more I read, the more I cared about every single one of these characters. By the end, I was nothing but a puddle of emotions 🥹

🌺If you're looking for a moving, emotional book, please add this to your TBR today!

🎧This audiobook was perfectly cast with Almarie Guerra as the narrator! She was so easy to listen to and really made the characters come alive for me! Highly recommend this format, especially since this book is a chonker!!

I am rating this book a 3.5, rounded up from a 3.0. I love generational sagas and family dramas, but the story has to connect with me, and this one didn't really. I was very engaged for parts of this book and disconnected and bored for other parts. The book could have been edited down a bit. There were a lot of characters and jumping timelines, which interfered with the emotional depth of the book. To me, this book is about a search for identity and the impact on the women, based on the timeline of the story. Rafaela grows up very wealthy in Puerto Rico, but due to family misfortune, has to take secretarial work in Trinidad. She feels the other workers are beneath her, and ends up marrying a man because he is handsome and white and someone she thinks can take her back to a life of comfort. That doesn't happen. He is a typical 1950s husband, and they move to a typical 1950s city, where she is treated like a third class citizen. Her son grows up longing to move back to Puerto Rico. Her daughter Ruth tries to ignore her background and blend in, by also trying to ignore the feeling of being alien and not belonging. She marries and has children who want to identify with their Puerto Rican heritage. Ruth's daughter Daisy moves back to Puerto Rico and opens a store. She is involved in a bad accident. The family comes together, secrets are revealed, and everything is wrapped up way too quickly and neatly. I couldn't believe the secret that came out in the end and how blasé' everyone was about it. I wish I could have had a story about one mother and one daughter and had more story developed about them.

I was very skeptical about this book because I remember all the controversy surrounding [book:American Dirt|45046527]. I don't necessarily think that someone can never write about experiences that aren't theirs and do justice to other races and ethnicities and cultures, but my memory of that situation was that people felt Cummins didn't do her due diligence and employed a lot of racist stereotypes (and also that the writing was bad). But I wanted to give this a chance because the synopsis sounded really interesting. And I'm glad I did, because this is a really enjoyable story.

This book follows three generations of women from the same family. In present-day Puerto Rico, Daisy gets caught in a bad hurricane and ends up in critical condition at the hospital. Her family deals with the fallout, and we flash back to her mother Ruth, who was raised in St. Louis with a white father and Puerto-Rican mother and has an extremely complicated relationship with her heritage. We also flash to her mother Rafaela, who lived in Puerto Rico until her white husband moved them to St. Louis. Rafaela also reminisces on her own childhood and the racism her mother was subjected to because she had darker skin.

I found this story really touching. It delves deep into many different facets of racism and classism: Rafaela is subjected to explicit racism from her husband's family and everyone in their community, but she also has immense financial privilege and is extremely naive about the differences between how she navigates the world and how their housekeeper's son navigates the world. Ruth feels unable to access her heritage because of a lifetime of trying to fit in and conforming to whiteness, and Daisy wants to reconnect with her ethnicity that she's never known. A lot of this resonated with me - my mother is Puerto Rican, but I've never lived there and I wasn't raised speaking Spanish, and I don't feel like I have the right to identify strongly with that heritage. This book also really depicts how difficult parent-child relationships are and how you always learn things new about each other as you grow up. I thought the writing was great, and the parallel timelines worked well. I enjoyed it a lot.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an advanced reader's copy!

Thank you to Henry Holt, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for early copies in exchange for my honest opinion. I highly recommend checking this book out - I could not put this book down once I started it, listening to the audiobook while I went for a walk by this river near where I used to live and then switching to reading on the bus on my way back to my current neighborhood. I listened some more the next morning, and it nearly killed me to wait until the end of the school day to be able to finish. If you like multi-generational family sagas (like I do), this book is for you!
Set partially in Puerto Rico and in the US, this book transported me back to my travels in PR. I was recently there, but only on the tarmac/airport to fuel up en route back to Boston from the USVI, so I am very aware of how close St Thomas and San Juan are, which plays a part in one plot point of the story.
What does “home” mean to you? This book investigates how a sense of home can be defined and passed between generations, much more than a single physical location. I know some people define home by the people they want to be surrounded by or the places they want to be surrounded by or even the feelings they want to be surrounded by. I really enjoyed reading about the different “home” feelings for the characters in this book and think it will make other readers stop and think about what home means to them, too.

I absolutely loved "American Dirt," and selected it for my neighborhood book club -- and everyone in that group also loved the novel. I was very interested to read Speak to Me of Home -- I have been to Puerto Rico, my parents lived there in the 1950s on a job assignment, and I thought it would be another masterpiece.

The story follows three generations of women -- the matriarch, Rafaela, deals with assimilation and change when she moves from Puerto Rico to St. Louis, MO, with her Irish American husband, but she does enjoy the lifestyle her husband's success brings them. Her daughter, Ruth, deals with her own issues regarding the struggle to fit in a society where she is not white enough/not Puerto Rican enough. Ruth's daughter, Daisy, moves to Puerto Rico to experience her family's heritage, but she also has struggles with language, money and success.

The writing is beautiful, and the author -- as she did in American Dirt (despite the criticism that, as a white woman, she couldn't fully understand and write about the hardships of Mexicans trying to immigrate to the U.S. to escape persecution and poverty),does another outstanding job with making the reader appreciate the hardships of moving to another country and trying to fit in while keeping as much of their heritage as they can.

My issues with the book is that it jumps around so much between the three different timelines/storylines/locations that it made the novel disjointed to this reader. I also found the whole DNA story unnecessary. Still, the beautiful writing and the three women's stories make this a worthwhile read.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the author and Henry Holt and Co. for the eARC and the opportunity to read and review this novel.

“Speak to Me of Home” By Jeanine Cummins is the three-generational tale of Rafaela, Ruth, and Daisy. Moving between the 1950s and today and set in San Juan, New York, and St. Louis, it deftly explores so many issues issues of family, home, belonging, race, acceptance, and of course love.

I’m not a big fan of multiple timelines, which seems to be increasingly popular nowadays, and I wish writers would go back to telling family sagas that are linear. I really enjoyed this book, but I would’ve enjoyed it a million times more if it started with the 1950s and moved to today. The timeline jumped around so much that I sometimes was confused. Many thanks to Net Galley and to the publisher for an ARC of this book. My opinions are my own.

A wonderful family saga about three generations of women. Rafaela grows up in a wealthy family in Puerto Rico, but after her family loses their position in society, she ends up marrying an American man who eventually brings her and their children to live in the US. Their daughter Ruth just wants to fit in once they move to America, and grows up to marry an Irish man. Meanwhile Ruth’s daughter Daisy feels a strong pull to Puerto Rico and eventually moves back there as a young woman.

All three women are such vivid and wonderful characters, and even though the book jumps not only between their perspectives but also around in time within their stories, I never found myself confused. The book is also a wonderful exploration of not just family dynamics, but also class and race and identity, of coming from a mixed background and how that can make you feel you don’t belong to either group - not to mention what home really means. And a book that has me crying through the last chapter and when the book ends is always a sign of a great book for me.

I also must add that I was lucky enough to attend a live pre-taping of the Totally Booked with Zibby podcast where Zibby Owen’s interviewed Jeannine. At the time I’m writing this, it hasn’t aired yet, but I highly recommend listening once it does because it was such a fabulous interview. I normally prefer not to hear an author speak about a book until after I have read it, but in this case I have to say that hearing about the inspiration for this book and how some of it was based on her real family truly enhanced my enjoyment of the book.

4.5 stars

This story follows the lives of 3 multigenerational family members - Rafaela, Ruth and Daisy. The story jumps back and forth in their perspective storylines between the present and the past. It was a nice easy going read. Nothing terribly suspenseful. It gave me a different perspective about the racism that might still be present today, especially for people who are multicultural. Those people of a mixed race may not feel comfortable with either race and not know how they fit into society. It was a good read but I liked her book American Dirt better. Thank you to the publish and to NetGalley for giving me an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

4.5 stars rounded up

Speak to Me of Home is my favorite kind of novel--a family saga with multiple generations, Mother daughter love and drama--and I absolutely loved this one from beginning to the end. It is very different from American Dirt, and I went into Cummins newest novel not knowing quite what to expect. Speak to Me of Home has so much going on, with three generations of women, their loves and their relationships with each other, as well as their feelings about belonging and the prejudices of others toward those who may or may not be immigrants.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel was the attitudes of others towards the women based on the relative lightness or darkness of their skin both in America and Puerto Rico. I could feel the betrayal Rafaela felt when her husband either didn't understand or was unable to stand up to those that slighted her because she was Puerto Rican. The different experiences of the women were fascinating and the concept of belonging and 'home' was a theme that was woven throughout the story.

The novel jumps back and forth in time between the 1950's, present day, and the years in between, also between San Juan, New York and St. Louis. It was at times difficult to reorient myself at the beginning of a new chapter, especially since the characters were consistent throughout. Aside from the need to stop and think a bit, maybe reading a few paragraphs again, the story flowed well and came together beautifully.

Thank you to Netgalley and Henry Holt for the digital ARC of Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins. The opinions in this review are my own.

Speak to Me of Home is a touching exploration of what it means to find one's place in the world told from three generations of women across Puerto Rico, Missouri and New York.
It’s achingly beautiful, deeply moving and even humorous at times.
It’s about identity and belonging, portraying the women’s struggles, dreams and fears throughout their personal journeys.
It was interesting to see how each of them navigated cultural differences, impacting their relationships while searching for a sense of belonging.
The characters are well-developed and the narration is authentic and fluid, which allowed me to get lost in this incredible story. I loved Rafaela’s humor and spunk, Ruth’s heart and strong moral compass and Daisy’s love for heritage and relics of the past.
Thank you to the publisher/author for the opportunity to listen to this complimentary advanced copy. Opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I enjoyed this, but not nearly as much as the author's other two that I've read. I liked some parts more than others - Ruth's childhood was the most interesting to me. But I still don't understand why she became so rude later in life?

Lack of research pet peeve: Ruth was using Facebook in 1999, but it wasn’t even created until 2003.

This book begins with a surprise call about a tragedy in another country, and from there, everything changes. It kicks off a powerful story that follows three generations of women, their choices, and the lasting effects of those choices.

The characters were so well written . Each one brought something important to the story. I loved how the book showed strength , struggles and how all of their lives were connected.

It’s an emotional and thoughtful story about family , love, and how the past shapes the future. If you like character and family driven stories , I definitely recommend it.

Speak to Me of Home is a multi-generational family saga spanning decades, set in San Juan, Puerto Rico and St. Louis, Missouri and tells the story of three strong women, Rafaela, Ruth and Daisy. The novel opens in 2023 with Daisy’s involvement in a tragic accident in Puerto Rico during the midst of a devastating hurricane. Rafaela and Ruth are stuck in the States until the airport opens. The novel moves back and forth through the decades as we learn how Rafaela and Ruth (grandmother and mother of Daisy) end up in the States.

I really enjoyed the nonlinear flow of the novel and the character development of the three women. There are also male characters who were important to the story but less developed. The struggles of all three to find the place they called home was written in such an empathetic manner but also with plenty of humor; there were some laugh out loud moments. Readers who enjoy family drama and heart will definitely want to read this. I am so glad the author had the fortitude to continue her writing career.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and Henry Holt and Co./Macmillan Publishers for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.