Warning: light spoilers ahead
También de este lado hay sueños. On this side too, there are dreams.
Courtesy: Rioaxaca
SUMMARY:
Lydia was living a comfortable middle-class life. She ran a bookstore and her husband was a journalist. One day a customer, Javier, enters her store and stands out from the rest. He is charming and friendly. He likes all the same books as Lydia. She does not know that he is the leader of a rising drug cartel in Mexico. Once her husband publishes an article exposing Javier, something happens that changes their lives forever.
The story follows Lydia and her eight-year-old son Luca on their journey from Acapulco (a city on the southwest bend of Mexico) to the border and beyond. The journey takes them from cities to deserts and from sneaking onto buses to hopping onto trains. Along the way, they use their faith, their wit and their luck to escape from those looking for them. They find a new family, learn many lessons and question whether or not the American dreams that they have can really become their reality.
The city of Acapulco.
Courtesy: Darvin Santos
THE AUTHOR:
American Dirt was only released on Jan. 21, 2020, but already has readers raving with reviews, largely due in part to it being chosen by Oprah’s Book Club. The author, Jeanine Cummins, has already been in the world’s spotlight with bestselling memoir A Rip in Heaven (which is about the attack of her brother and the murder of her two cousins). In Cummins’ author note, she mentions how the memoir and husband, who is an undocumented immigrant, inspired her to write this story. As Cummins says, she has a “dog in the fight”.
Courtesy: Extra.ie
THE GENRE:
The Goodreads page for American Dirt lists the book as fitting the genres of both “fiction” and “contemporary”. Many comments on the book’s page are of readers stating in surprise how they never read anything like this book anymore.
HOW LONG IT TOOK ME:
As an e-book of 392 pages, it took me 7 hours and 12 minutes to read through this book (that is a little bit over a minute per page).
MAIN CHARACTERS:
Lydia: A 32-year-old woman mitigating the migrant journey, as well as grieving over her family, all while fighting for the survival of herself and her son, Luca.
Luca: The brilliant eight-year-old son of Lydia with a knack for geography and understanding the world around him.
Javier: The leader of the cartel that attacked Lydia’s family, Los Jardineros. They are called “The Gardeners” because of their choice of weapons.
MAIN THEMES:
Family: American Dirt starts and ends with family, both the one that you are born with and the one that you find along the way.
Hope: As a story about a mother and her son migrating to the States, it is unsurprising that hope is a recurring theme. Luca speaks of irrational hope that everything was just a dream, Javier speaks of how he hoped the love he had for his daughter and Lydia would be enough and Lydia is constantly hoping to survive.
REVIEWS:
“From its heart-stopping first sentence to its heart-shattering last, Cummins’ story of immigrants is just what we need now. Gritty yet sensitive, realistic yet hopeful, grand and granular, American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is a Grapes of Wrath for our times.”
- Don Winslow, author of the New York Times bestseller The Border
“I defy anyone to read the first seven pages of this book and not finish it.”
- Stephen King
“Her obra de caca [translation: here] belongs to the great American tradition of doing the following: 1. Appropriating genius works by people of color… [and] 3. Repackaging them for mass racially “colorblind” consumption.”
- Myriam Gurba, Chicana writer
FINAL NOTES:
If you look up American Dirt tonight, you are bound to drag up a good bit of controversy. Most of it stems from something Cummins’ herself says in her afterword— she wished “someone slightly browner than [her] would write [the story]”. Back in December, Chicana writer Myriam Gurba wrote an article attacking the book for its clichés, stereotypes, and appropriate of the Mexican immigration story. On social media, people began attacking Cummins and Gurba in defense of both sides of the story.
The options it seems are read the story itself and form your own opinions on the story or listen to writers on Twitter that are pleading with their audiences to read other works that they believe are true to the Mexican immigration story. Either way, American Dirtis on track to be in the hands of book club readers and on the tops of book charts everywhere.
Want to see more HCFSU? Be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!