{ "item_title" : "Keeper of My Kin", "item_author" : [" Ada Ferrer "], "item_description" : "NATIONAL BESTELLER * Named a Best Book of Summer by TIME and Oprah Daily * A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2026 From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History comes a heartbreaking yet redemptive memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history. In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer's mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger story of a world historical revolution. Yet, in another more intimate family history, that choice was a crossroads, ultimately inseparable from who and what they all became. In this beautiful memoir, Ferrer masterfully shifts between her roles as historian and family member, weaving a multigenerational tale that reaches into the past to understand the circumstances and choices that led to the present. We see key historical events through the eyes of the family: the grandmother who raised Poly after Ada's departure, a Black woman born a year after the end of slavery in Cuba; Ada's parents, forced to invent themselves anew in a foreign land; and two brothers left behind--Poly and another, once-secret brother named Juan Jos , both of whose lives were marked irrevocably by revolution and family separation. Moving between Cuba and the United States and then back again, the book unpacks the experience and emotion of migration, in the moment of separation and over the long-term, for those who left and those who stayed. Using a treasure trove of letters written across the gulf of family separation and found after the death of Ada's parents, as well as government documents acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests, Ferrer offers us a profound reflection on belonging, memory, and the lasting imprint of history.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/66/802/565/1668025655_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "30.00", "our_price" : "30.00", "club_price" : "30.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "30.00" } }

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Some memoirs swagger with the author’s self-importance. Not historian Ada Ferrer’s magnificent, aptly titled Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter. Ferrer, a habitué of musty, fragile archives and a brilliant writer, won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Cuba: An American History. In this memoir, she writes “as the strange daughter who loves to document her parents’ memories.” The story she tells is “a chronicle of a family broken by history and made by it, too.”

In April 1963, shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, Ferrer left Cuba at 10 months old in the arms of her mother. Her father, an anti-communist, had been in the U.S. for several years, working as a punch press operator in Brooklyn, New York. At the time, most people thought the Castro regime would soon fall. But Ferrar’s mother didn’t want to wait; she was deeply in love, and even a relatively short separation from her husband was intolerable. Ferrar’s working-class immigrant parents would live with each other deep into their old age, first in New York City, then New Jersey and, finally, Miami Beach.

This memoir is very much a love story. It is also a story of traumatic family rupture. When Ferrar and her mother left Cuba, they left behind her brother Poly, her mother’s 9-year-old son from her first marriage. The boy’s distant father, an aspirant in the regime’s security forces, had refused to let him leave the country. Poly didn’t follow them until 1980—when 125,000 Cubans migrated to Key West, Florida, during the Mariel boatlift—and he did so as an angry, emotionally disturbed man with a fifth grade education. After her mother’s death, Ferrer found Poly’s carefully preserved boyhood letters. Examining the stark contrasts of their lives leads Ferrer to recognize that “the decision to focus my life’s work on Cuba has always been a kind of penance for being the chosen one that long-ago spring day of 1963. I became who I am to redress the balance.”

There is more—much more—in this remarkable memoir. The revelation of another abandoned brother, for example; the complexity of Cuba’s racial history; a historian’s love of official and unofficial archives. Keeper of My Kin is full and resonant and simply superb.