From Publishers Weekly
In search of her Cuban roots in modern-day Havana, American Alysia Briggs reinvents herself in Wixon's frank, fearless novel, based on her Salon.com Havana Honey series. At 13, Alysia loses her mother to cancer and is then raised in privilege by her cold, WASPy diplomat father. But she later confirms that her birth father was native Cuban José Antonio. Determined to track him down, Alysia dashes off to Cuba, but when all her cash is stolen and her diplomat father turns his back on her, she is stranded. Wixon evokes the exigencies of Cuban life as she graphically details Alysia's entrance into the sex trade and transformation to a
jinetera, or jockey, "a fitting metaphor for what many educated and beautiful Cuban women do after hours to feed their families as well as their dreams." Though Wixon renders Alysia's yearning for José Antonio and her attraction to Cuba palpable while vividly capturing Havana's rhythms and the power imbalance between struggling native women and North American sexual tourists, the narrator's acceptance of the call-girl lifestyle is rife with contradiction. Alysia presents the role as empowering and occasionally pleasurable at the same time she reveals it as a dangerous and last-ditch response to poverty. Wixon leaves the reader, like Alysia, bewitched by Havana's allure even as the heroine's immersion in
jinterismo strains credibility.
Agent, Stephanie Abou.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
This first novel was initially excerpted in the online magazine
Salon and features the ruthless sexual marketplace that is modern Cuba. Alysia Vilar travels to Cuba to track down her real father, a translator with whom her mother had an affair. Almost immediately, all of her money is stolen, and the thieving landlords kick her out of the house. She is taken in by a respected Havana heart surgeon named Camila, who makes $32 a month and supplements her salary by acquiring foreign boyfriends who deposit money into her account. Camila^B is known as a
jinetera, and in order to survive and fund the search for her father, Alysia becomes one also. In a series of brutally graphic scenarios, Alysia plays out a grotesque form of courtship, in which she disguises her true ethnicity and her education and falsely flatters potential foreign boyfriends, known as
yumas, into parting with vast sums of money. Part survival story, part eye-opening morality tale, this novel hits hardest in its depiction of proud women forced to prostitute themselves just to live.
Joanne WilkinsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
