As shown in How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, Angie Cruz is a writer concerned with human vulnerability. Her characters yearn for connection and warmth while struggling to adjust to new cultures and carrying the wounds from the past. In this novel, the protagonist, Cara Romero, comes to view her life in a new light and attempts to shift her point of view in an effort to accept the people she loves. At the same time, she is constantly working to make ends meet and care for her neighbors. Cara, like many of Cruz's other characters, struggles to get what she needs as she is so caught up in getting through each day. Cruz's other work explores similar themes in different contexts.
Cruz's early novels, Soledad (2001) and Let It Rain Coffee (2005), focus on characters haunted by the past. Soledad is about a young Dominican woman named Soledad who is from Washington Heights. She gets into the liberal arts college Cooper Union but is eventually drawn back to her roots when her mother becomes very ill. As the novel progresses, Soledad begins to piece together her parents' past and get a sense of the events that shaped them. In Let It Rain Coffee, the Colón family is torn apart by political differences and hardships in the United States. It follows the matriarch of the family, Esperanza, as she takes her family from the Dominican Republic to America and back, in search of some semblance of happiness. In both novels, Cruz, like William Faulkner, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, emphasizes the fact that her characters cannot find closure or peace without first making sense of the past.
In her more recent novel, Dominicana (2019), Cruz writes about a girl named Ana who grows impoverished in the Dominican Republic. At a very young age, her parents marry her off to a man named Juan. She comes to America to live with Juan and quickly settles into a very unhappy life with him, as he cheats on her frequently and has a nasty temper. Juan leaves New York on business and his brother, Cesar, takes care of Ana in his place. The two become very close and Ana starts to fall for him, despite remaining married to Juan. Ana changes and grows as the novel goes on, seeking a better life for herself away from Juan and his cruelty. Like Soledad and Cara, Ana wants joy in her life and refuses to settle for years and years of misery. She perseveres in the face of adversity, even when faced with hard, frightening circumstances. This is a recurrent concern for Cruz, as she analyzes the way these women become trapped in their lives and the extraordinary measures they take to escape into something else.
