SPEAK TO ME OF HOME
What does it mean to call a place home?
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeanine Cummins comes a deeply felt multigenerational family story, read by Almarie Guerra.
On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments.
In the 1980s,
What does it mean to call a place home?
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeanine Cummins comes a deeply felt multigenerational family story, read by Almarie Guerra.
On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments.
In the 1980s, against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth, wants only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. It’s not until decades later when Ruth’s own daughter, Daisy, returns to San Juan that her mother and grandmother begin to truly reflect on the choices that have come to define their lives.
When a hurricane ravages the island in 2023, leaving Daisy critically injured, Rafaela and Ruth return to the city where their story began. As they gather at Daisy’s bedside, we follow them back into the moments that brought them to this point: We watch as they come of age, fall in love, take risks, and contend with all the heartbreaks, triumphs, and reversals of fortune—both good and bad—that make up a meaningful life. As old memories come to light, so do buried secrets, leaving everyone in the family wondering exactly where it is that they belong.
A striking, resonant examination of marriage, family, and identity, Speak to Me of Home is ultimately a story of mothers and daughters that asks: How can three women who share geography and genetics have such wildly different ideas of where they come from? And, more important, can they discover a common language to find their way back home?
- Macmillan Audio
- Audio
- May 2025
- 15 hours 27 minutes
- 9781250354136
Buy the Book
$32.99
About Jeanine Cummins & Almarie Guerra (Narrator)
Jeanine Cummins is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of American Dirt, which was an Oprah’s Book Club and a Barnes & Noble Book Club selection, as well as a #1 Indie Next pick. The novel has been translated into thirty-seven languages and sold more than three and a half million copies worldwide. Her other works include the memoir A Rip in Heaven, and the novels The Outside Boy and The Crooked Branch. She lives in New York with her husband, their two daughters, and their dogs.
Praise
“[A] moving novel.” —AARP, “Spring’s Top Reads”
“A fine novel. . . . Daisy’s sections are the heart of the novel, dipping into magical realism as her spirit navigates the border between life and death and brings the family to her bedside with triumphant and transcendent love. This commendable return for Cummins comes with a surprise cherry-on-top twist.” —Booklist
“Engrossing. . . . Cummins succeeds at breathing life into her large cast of characters and excels at depicting the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship.” —Publishers Weekly
“Jeanine Cummins’ Speak To Me Of Home is a masterful love letter to our shared homeland of Puerto Rico, the global diaspora, and every American. Once again, Cummins surveys the depths of the immigrant experience and compassionately examines the push and pull between our individual identity and our ancestral ties. Through three generations of Boricua women, the novel powerfully demonstrates that the greatest inheritance we can pass on is a courageous heart willing to adapt. Speak To Me Of Home is an epic must-read!” —Sarah McCoy, New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?
“Jeanine Cummins’ new novel is a beautiful, tender, complex story of origin, displacement, identity, and belonging. Poetically written and brimming with heart, Speak to Me of Home tells of a family’s yearning, through the generations, to find the roots that truly anchor them, the land that calls them home. A most moving and meaningful read.” —Jennifer Rosner, award-winning author of Once We Were Home and The Yellow Bird Sings
Discussion Questions
- In your life, which places have you called home? Do you think multiple places can be considered home? In your experience, what makes a place feel like home?
- Rafaela, Ruth, and Daisy all have strong, complex, and wildly different feelings about their connections to Puerto Rico. Does this kind of generational shift in identity exist your own family? If so, which character most closely espouses the way you relate to your own heritage?
- What role does language play in the story and the narration? How do the characters’ relationships to their mother tongue and second languages reflect their senses of identity?
- Near the end of the book, Rafaela reveals a bombshell that leaves her whole family reeling. What do you think of her revelation? Do you have empathy for the decisions she made as a young wife and mother, or are her actions unforgivable?
- Speak to Me of Home follows the stories of three generations of women. How are Rafaela, Ruth, and Daisy’s characters and trajectories influenced by the decade in which each of them is born? How do they influence one another? How might the milestones in these women’s lives be different if the novel had been set across another set of decades?