The Tilting House: An Evidential Book on Communism in Cuba

Yuri is a 16-year-old orphan who lives simply with her religious aunt in a big, old house in Communist Cuba in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yuri's parents had named her after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin, hoping that one day she would grow up to be a famous female astronaut. Yuri now has vague hopes of being accepted into the Lenin school, Cuba's prestigious preparatory, reports The Associated Press (AP).

Yuri and her Aunt Ruth's quiet lives are suddenly turned upside down when an unexpected visitor from "la Yuma" - slang for the United States - shows up at their Havana home with a camera swinging from her neck and announcing she is family. Ruth later tells Yuri that 34-year-old Mariela is her daughter, and that when Mariela was an infant she sent her to live with a family in the United States through Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. government program in which thousands of unaccompanied children were sent from Cuba to Miami in the early 1960s.

"The Tilting House," by Miami-based writer Ivonne Lamazares, is an affecting and sometimes amusing coming-of-age novel set in a country that few have had the opportunity to visit, despite its proximity to the U.S.

It's a study of hidden family secrets, the unhealed wound of losing a mother and the quest for home.