Reviews with content warning for Suicide - American Dirt

Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

28 reviews

missai's review against another edition

adventurous sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

An intimate, action-packed exploration of what it takes to make the treacherous journey across Mexico and to the U.S. border. This book illustrates the mentality and resolve required to literally leave everything behind in search of a better life. It also shows how losing everything, being driven to rock bottom, makes even the risk of death seem inconsequential. The characters we meet shed their identities, and at times their humanity, to survive just one more day, one more mile.

Unfortunately, this book falls into the paradoxically "sanitized-yet-still-trauma-porn" category that is endemic in women's historical fiction. One could argue that the numbness experienced by the characters is mirrored in the reader's own experience, where every new terrible thing is no longer shocking. To me, though, this concept wasn't executed well enough, and reads as more of a stylistic issue, which extends to other areas of the writing.

Narrated from third-person, the POV sporadically jumps around to various characters outside the main one. Consequently, all of the perspectives are watered down. The son's POV felt contrived and didn't add any emotional depth for me. Once the twins were introduced, I actually found the main character's plot line wholly uninteresting and wanted to know more about the girls. They experience so much intimate trauma that is largely brushed aside and used as a plot device.

And I have issues with the world building in general. I didn't come out of this novel feeling like I learned much about how cartels operate, how migrants navigate the "legal" systems in Mexico, or how U.S. government decisions regarding the border impacted migrants' journeys. All of these elements are included superficially, so I was disappointed that the novel didn't add any depth to my existing understanding of these topics. It also rubbed me the wrong way how the story romanticized the cartel leader; I'm all for humanizing villains, but it was done in a light-handed way that I think leans more towards problematic than nuanced.

Overall, the prose was good and so was the narration, but American Dirt is certainly not the tell-all on Mexican migrants' experiences the way positive reviews make it out to be.

Content Warnings