Dirty Blonde and Half Cuban

In search of her Cuban roots in modern-day Havana, American Alysia Briggs reinvents herself in Wixon's frank, fearless novel, based on her Salon.com Havana Honey series. At 13, Alysia loses her mother to cancer and is then raised in privilege by her cold, WASPy diplomat father. But she later confirms that her birth father was native Cuban José Antonio. Determined to track him down, Alysia dashes off to Cuba, but when all her cash is stolen and her diplomat father turns his back on her, she is stranded. Wixon evokes the exigencies of Cuban life as she graphically details Alysia's entrance into the sex trade and transformation to a jinetera , or jockey, "a fitting metaphor for what many educated and beautiful Cuban women do after hours to feed their families as well as their dreams." Though Wixon renders Alysia's yearning for José Antonio and her attraction to Cuba palpable while vividly capturing Havana's rhythms and the power imbalance between struggling native women and North American sexual tourists, the narrator's acceptance of the call-girl lifestyle is rife with contradiction. Alysia presents the role as empowering and occasionally pleasurable at the same time she reveals it as a dangerous and last-ditch response to poverty. Wixon leaves the reader, like Alysia, bewitched by Havana's allure even as the heroine's immersion in jinterismo strains credibility. Agent, Stephanie Abou . (May)