October 1, 2023
Novelist Figueroa (Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer) was raised by a Puerto Rican mother abandoned by her family and intent on assimilation; in Mother Island, Figueroa discusses healing from a fractured childhood and discovering her Puerto Rican self as an adult. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from January 1, 2024
A novelist turns to memoir to mine the spirit and substance of what a mother is. Reeling from a divorce and underemployment, Figueroa, author of Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, found herself in Santa Fe, New Mexico, vulnerable and primed to more deeply reflect on and return to her roots. In her memoir, she excavates these roots from her childhood, cutting into them across generations and unearthing them on the island of Puerto Rico, the homeland of her Ta�no ancestors. As a child, the author first understood herself as a member of a "feminine collective" that contained her mother and her two older sisters, even as they all rode the roller coaster of her mother's history of trauma, her resulting emotional unpredictability and dependency, and her series of marriages to white men. Figueroa enchantingly shifts and sifts through her memories of a childhood spent between these marriages, and of the way her mother leaned into and out of her "exotic" beauty and its snarly, disorienting attention, power, shame, menace, and safety. Chronicling her journey through her work in the healing arts, the ending of her own marriage to a white man ("a hand-me-down version of one of my mother's"), and the practice and profession of writing and teaching, she teases further discussion of Puerto Rico's relationship to the mainland U.S. In the final third of the book, Figueroa returns more fully to this matter, along with its associated topics of race, internalized colonization, and assimilation. Throughout the text, the author sprinkles an artful balance of just-personal-enough details, magical imagery, and insightful analysis. Her exceptional command of her craft builds narrative tension while granting force to the way her personal history mirrors geopolitical devastation and imbuing her voice with the power of one no longer unclaimed by, but ready to lay claim to. A searching and lyrical memoir packed with nuance and depth.
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March 8, 2024
Don't expect Jamie Figueroa, author of the wonderful debut novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer (2021), to write a straightforward memoir. Her recounting of the forces that shaped her life throbs with power and depth of feeling. Besides claiming Puerto Rico, Figueroa also reclaims her mother's story, so similar to that of the island: an independent spirit subject to the strictures of a stingy patriarchy. She recounts her mother's suffering when she was abandoned and left in an orphanage after ostensibly being brought to the Midwest to reunite with her parents. Figueroa also discusses her mother's broken marriages and ruminates over her own trauma as a brown girl growing up in an overwhelmingly white Ohio town. Her recollections of her struggles with identity and purpose resonate with intensity as she chronicles her search for healing as she works as a massage therapist and experiences marriage and motherhood. Figueroa's prose sings with palpable joy when she describes a journey to Puerto Rico with her mother where the two reconnect with family and find a new past to which to fasten their lives and senses of self. With descriptions of her life in New Mexico and many references to Puerto Rican culture, Figueroa's lyricism never falters in this beautiful, thought-provoking, heartfelt memoir.
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