Plantains and the 7 Plagues, a Memoir: Half-Dominican, Half-Cuban and Full Life

Ellis crafts a love letter to her family in this flawed but charming memoir. Her story begins in 1966, with her Dominican mother’s reluctance to get involved with a divorced Cuban man who already had a four-year-old child. He didn’t give up and they eventually married, with Ellis and her younger sister born within a few years. Ellis’s stories of being raised in and around New Jersey and New York City are candid and sometimes humorous, including such events as her mother slapping her kindergarten teacher (whom Ellis had dubbed “the wicked witch”) and her grandmother’s increasingly bizarre behavior, as with an attempt to shoplift by hiding items underneath her trench coat (but since she was naked beneath the coat, they all fell out). Ellis interweaves the personal material with Cuban and Dominican political history, expanding the scope of an otherwise episodic memoir. The writing is often unpolished and the beginning is confusing, with info dumps and skips in time and location. Bafflingly, the ending upends the overall upbeat feel and fixates on the author’s bitter dislike of her father-in-law and her melancholy over the loss of her mother. Other than the off-putting ending, this memoir of a biracial, first-generation American is pleasant and full of an infectious zest for life. [em](BookLife) [/em]