Speak to me of home

by Jeanine Cummins

Rafaela remembers everything that matters: her beautiful childhood in San Juan, her marriage to Peter, uprooting their children, Ruth and Benny, to the American Midwest, and losing all sense of her place in the world. So she tells no one when her memory begins to slip.

Her daughter, in New York with a family of her own, wishes she could forget her muddy feelings about where she comes from - the same feelings which motivated her 22-year-old daughter Daisy to reconnect with their past. Daisy, who has momentarily forgotten everything, hears the word critical in a hospital room in San Juan and remembers, all at once, the car that hurtled towards her, the terrible storm, and something else. What was it?Now Ruth and Rafaela must return to the city where it all began, to gather by Daisy's bedside and confront the twists of fate that have caused a growing rift in their family and led them to this moment.

448 pages, Paperback

Published March 6, 2026

About the author

Jeanine Cummins is the author of four books: the bestselling memoir A Rip in Heaven, and the novels The Outside Boy, The Crooked Branch, and American Dirt. She lives in New York with her husband and two children.

Reviews

[Tara Candon · Rating 3 out of 5]

(this is actually such word vomit feel free ignore) I loved this book so much. I didn’t know anything about it before I read it but it’s so interesting and intriguing from the start. I love how it’s set through different eras and focuses on different members of a family. I thought the book was really well written and immersed you into each characters feelings , thoughts and actions due to who they were and the time they were living in. I thought all the characters were very complex and not one dimensional at all. It is was really refreshing to read about characters who weren’t just completely perfect or completely awful. I think this book found the perfect balance between to make all the characters feel real and human. I did think that the ending felt very rushed and I wasn’t sure I loved how the grandmother and mother’s story ended. I felt the book stayed very consistent with who the grandmother and daughter were throughout the book ( apart from when they matured due to the events of the story ) but I felt the mother character completely changed from childhood to adulthood with little explanation as to why.But overall the book was such an enjoyable read and I would definitely recommend.