Synopsis
When Catalina Ortiz Midori walks into a shabby New York dance studio for her first mambo class, she has no idea her life is about to change. A Japanese-Cuban immigrant who has lost touch with her Cuban roots, Catalina is mesmerized by the one-eyed teacher, El Tuerto, a titan of the New York mambo scene, and drawn to the dazzling technique of Wendy Cardoza, a Bronx mambera who is one of its reigning queens. Catalina's apprenticeship with them, and her growing obsession with the world of mambo — the music, the dancers, the seductive dance itself — will bring her back to her origins with a passion she didn't know she possessed, and inadvertently draw her into a sinister Miami exile scheme through her disreputable cousin Guillermo.
The Washington Post - Michael Griffith
Chao induces the reader to feel the intensity of her characters' pleasure in dancing -- mostly by cleaving, early on, to Catalina Ortiz Midori, half-Cuban, half-Japanese and a woman in the throes of a full-out mambo obsession. Chao entangles Lina's joy in dancing with assorted other passions, especially the desire to reconnect with her Latina identity, which she has let slip away in the years since 1973, when she and her mother fled Cuba. Nor does the novelist scant on erotic ardor. We see Lina grow intoxicated by her ever more precise and artful control of her feet, hips, hands, and we see how bodily exuberance translates easily, even inevitably, into sexual energy.