Jubana! The Awkwardly True and Dazzling Adventures of a Jewish Cubana Goddess

Book review exerpt from Amazon.com: Writing in a unique voice that captures the distinctiveness of both her Jewish and Cuban heritages, Anders becomes a sort of Alice in Wonderland, leading readers through a looking-glass life, before and after her parents were forced from Cuba in the wake of Castro's revolution. Anders remembers a princess-perfect world in Havana, where her Jewish grandparents had immigrated in the 1920s and made their fortunes. Then, in a poignantly funny scene, the clan must leave with almost nothing. The guards even demand Anders surrender her red tricycle, but she fights them off with a signature willpower that becomes more evident as the story proceeds. Handled equally well are her Cuban Jewish, fish-out-of-water stories, culminating at her eastern private school, Sidwell Friends, or as she calls it, Frenzy. There's only one character more fascinating than Anders, and that's her gorgeous, redheaded, red-fingernailed, potty-mouthed ("Fohk!") Mami. And Mami's unquenchable charisma is the ongoing problem in the relationship between mother and daughter. Gigi is always playing catch-up with a mother who doesn't even know there's a competition on. Often laugh-out-loud funny, with lots of Spanglish dialogue and priceless cross-cultural moments