Speak to Me of Home

Speak to Me of Home opens with the following line: “Afterward, Ruth will say she knew the moment the phone rang, even before she picked it up. She will say there was something calamitous in the sound.” It’s as if Ruth knew Daisy was in trouble. Have you ever felt tethered to a person in this way? How would you describe that bond?

In your life, which places have you called home? Do you think multiple places can be considered home? In your experience, what makes a place feel like home?

When she’s a teenager, Rafaela’s family experiences an extreme and abrupt change in fortune that has lifelong repercussions for all of them. Is this a blessing or a curse in Rafaela’s life? In what ways would her life have been better if this change never occurred? In what ways would her life have been worse?

Benny and Ruth’s childhood in St. Louis is largely devoid of any of the familiar cultural touchstones of their earlier years in Puerto Rico. Within that context, what role does Titi Lola play in their lives? What role do Eddy and his family play?

Within the parameters of his generation, culture, and life experiences, is Peter a good husband to Rafaela? Is he a good father to Benny and Ruth? Why or why not?

Rafaela, Ruth, and Daisy all have strong, complex, and wildly different feelings about their connections to Puerto Rico. Does this kind of generational shift in identity exist your own family? If so, which character most closely espouses the way you relate to your own heritage?

What role does language play in the story? How do the characters’ relationships to their mother tongue and second languages reflect their senses of identity?

“Like a boomerang, Rafaela had sailed out into the world, out across Ponce and Trinidad and St. Louis and New York, across turmoil and strife and sorrow and growth, and she had tumbled and whipped and arced and flown, and there were times when she couldn’t have said which way was up.” Over the course of the novel, each character experiences many transitions, including relocations. How did these moves shape the characters?

What do you think of the middle-school transformation of Daisy’s brother from Charlie to Carlos? What role, if any, do his gender and sexuality play in this transformation? What do you think of the way Ruth and the others respond to him as he navigates his identity in this way?

Near the end of the book, Rafaela reveals a bombshell that leaves her whole family reeling. What do you think of her revelation? Do you have empathy for the decisions she made as a young wife and mother, or are her actions unforgivable?

What is the role of food in this story? How integral is food generally, in the development of a cultural foundation and the ways it influences a family’s sense of identity and belonging?

Speak to Me of Home follows the stories of three generations of women. How are Rafaela, Ruth, and Daisy’s characters and trajectories influenced by the decade in which each of them is born? How do they influence one another? How might the milestones in these women’s lives be different if the novel had been set across another set of decades?