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Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home

Stories

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"Ana Castillo is an American treasure. Fearless, compassionate, and flat-out brilliant—she is the writer we need as we navigate the challenges of our ever-changing world."—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

"Ana Castillo is de primera storyteller."—award-winning author Julia Alvarez

Literary legend Ana Castillo explores the secrets that are kept within households and the women they impact the most in this breakout collection that cements her place as a leading voice in feminist fiction.

The first person in her traditional Mexican American family to graduate from high school, Katia is entering adulthood at a time of turbulent change. Across the nation young people are fighting for civil and women's rights and protesting the Vietnam War and brutal dictatorships in South America. Like so many of her generation, Katia wants to make the world a better place, and is determined to follow her own path.

As she considers moving to California to join La Causa, Mexican American activist Cesar Chavez's movement to improve the working conditions of migrant farmer workers, Katia receives an unexpected gift from her father: a plane ticket to Mexico City. Bring back your mother, he says, tell her, her children need her. And so Katia joins this cause, to get Tina back to Chicago. But it won't be easy. Katia must learn to navigate a liberated version of her mother in a new country where she is now hawking supposedly superior cleaning products, called Donna Clean Well.

Katia is but one of the voices introduced in this dazzling collection of short fiction from revered writer Ana Castillo. Spanning from Chicago to Mexico to New Mexico, the stories in Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home illuminate a chorus of people whose stories will leave you breathless.

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    • Library Journal

      December 1, 2022

      An award-winning writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that plumbs the Latina experience, Castillo (Black Dove) unwinds stories exploring how women seek to break the boundaries that have been drawn for them and the secrets holding them back. Among the characters: Katia, who wants to join every good Sixties cause but is compelled by her father to seek out her happily liberated mother in Mexico and bring her back to the United States. The publisher hopes to bring Castillo to a larger audience; with a 40,000-copy first printing.

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      April 1, 2023
      A new collection of stories from a grande dame of Chicana literature. "Being who you are isn't static," says Ada, a middle-aged nurse in the story "Ada and Pablo." She should know: Everything she thought was stable about her life in Mexico City with her husband, Pablo, has become unfamiliar, from a surprising new friendship at work with a young, handsome doctor, to physical changes wrought by menopause. Most unsettled of all is her decades-long marriage to Pablo, as rumors and suspicions swirl about his behavior. Ada is not the only character tangled in this web of secrets in Castillo's collection, comprising seven long stories and a very brief prologue. A gay man whose accomplished sister, a professor in Chicago, dies suddenly goes through her papers and learns she had a secret life in Mexico that extended far beyond what he ever could have imagined of her ("Ven"). An architect visits the site of one of his elderly father's oft-told family legends to discover the facts behind it ("Cuernavaca"). In the memorable title story, set in the mid-1970s, 18-year-old Katia, a budding feminist near the top of her Chicago high school's graduating class, is sent to Mexico by her father to retrieve her mother, who has abruptly abandoned the family. Katia, obsessed as she is with learning what being a woman truly means--how free a woman's freedom can actually be--is shocked when she arrives in Mexico and learns her mother has fallen in love with another woman. Throughout these stories, Mexico is the source of both mystery and clarity, whether through characters' histories as immigrants or children of immigrants, or because, as happens frequently, the characters in these tales must travel there, like Dorothy to Oz, to unlock knowledge which often has the potential to alter their lives. Castillo's truth-seeking characters leave an impression.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      April 1, 2023
      "Cada cabeza es un mundo," as the Mexican dicho (saying) tells us; each person holds a world in their head. In the case of Castillo's story collection, the characters' worlds careen over, under, and around each other. From Chicago to Mexico City and other points south, these Mexicans, New Mexicans, Mexican immigrants, their descendants, and a few ghosts attempt to connect with varying levels of success. These snapshots, beginning in the 1970s and reaching to contemporary times, explore human bonds through tales dramatizing the challenges women have faced over the decades, including sexual assault, discrimination, and postpartum depression. From the brother who finds out after his sister's death that she had a secret family to the title story about a daughter sent to Mexico City to retrieve her runaway mother from her clandestine life, every character's story works out the query Castillo poses in her prologue, "Does an ant recognize the elm by the single root it so industriously scurries around?" Readers will be thrilled that Castillo has returned to fiction after her book of poetry, My Book of the Dead (2021).

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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