Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter

Pulitzer winner Ferrer (Cuba: An American History) traces the impact of her family’s migration in this wrenching account. In 1963, less than a year after Ferrer’s birth in Cuba, her mother fled to Mexico City on the first leg of a journey to join Ferrer’s father in New York. She left behind Ferrer’s older half brother, Poly, because of a dispute with the boy’s father. Though their contact was limited, Ferrer grew devoted to Poly, naming a doll after him and occasionally calling him on the phone. They were on different tracks, however: Ferrer enrolled at Vassar, while Poly struggled to finish grade school. After arriving in the U.S. in 1980, Poly came to live with Ferrer and her parents in New Jersey, but proved an angry presence who “got into fights, stabbed people, beat me” and “threatened to kill the whole family, his girlfriend, and then himself.” Ferrer muses on the divergent paths their lives took—Poly died of hypertension in 2020 after being diagnosed with schizophrenia—without judgment or excessive psychologizing. Instead, she braids a clear-eyed account of recent Cuban history with an empathetic catalog of its effects on her family. It’s a memorable and heartrending achievement. Agent: Gail Ross, WME. (May)