In a follow-up to Dreaming in Cuban, her 1992 debut, Cuban American novelist and journalist Cristina García returns to the beloved del Pino family with Vanishing Maps, which picks up two decades later with four del Pino generations now scattered around the globe.
Nonagenarian matriarch Celia remains in Santa Teresa del Mar, but she's "started dreaming again: of leaving Cuba, of visiting her ex-lover in Grenada," whom she hasn't seen in 66 years. Older daughter Lourdes, in Miami, publicly protests the return of a young boy to Cuba after he survived a boat escape that killed his mother. Pilar, Lourdes's daughter and a struggling Los Angeles artist, finally visits Lourdes with her young son, Azul. The contentious reunion of mother and daughter is brief, and Pilar decamps to Berlin, where her cousin Ivanito is both a notable polyglot translator and sensationally in-demand drag queen. His late mother, Celia's middle child, refuses to leave him alone, even in death. Celia's only son, Javier, is missing, but his daughter Irina--Ivanito's cousin--is a queen of sorts as well, having invented herself as the "brassiere queen of Russia," a manufacturing powerhouse. When she travels to Berlin to open another factory, she discovers an identical twin. Of course, these disparate paths must converge.
To have previously enjoyed Dreaming in Cuban is not required; Vanishing Maps stalwartly stands alone. Return readers might notice that García's inventive structure in both novels is similar, mixing third- and first-person narration, moving back and forth in time, and inserting interludes for illuminating, sometimes teasing, glimpses into the past. García presents an exquisite family affair to remember. --Terry Hong, BookDragon