A review by noapathy
Solito by Javier Zamora

3.0

This memoir is written from the perspective of the author's 9-year-old self as he travels on his own (with the help of smugglers) from El Salvador to his parents in the US in 1999. His story is horrendous and yet probably not out of the ordinary. I appreciate that writing from his perspective as a child helps break down everything that happened without placing all of the assumptions and labels of adults on the situation, but sometimes it just didn't work for me. Still, reading this was a good balance to the ethnographic study of human smugglers that I just finished (Soldiers & Kings).