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sean_kennelly 's review for:
American Dirt
by Jeanine Cummins
I’d been recommended this book by a few people, including my Dad who put it on the list of recommendations he has drafted for me. I also see it was featured on Oprah’s book club, so imagined it to be pretty mainstream. I took that to mean it would going to be thrilling page-turner.
The book follows Lydia and Luca, mother and son who are all that remains of their murdered family. We start in media res as they hide in a bathroom while all 16 members of their family are gunned down outside while having a picturesque barbecue. The cartel did this, and they want to finish the job and end their lives too. So Lydia and Luca hit the road, trusting no-one, and deeply aware of the cartels’ reach in every aspect of Mexican life. And Lydia is actually friends with the cartel boss Javier – he became a regular in her bookshop and began to fall in love with her. She was married though, and her husband was the journalist that wrote the headline-grabbing exposé of Javier’s evil-doings that drove his daughter to suicide. Hence the vendetta.
Eventually Lydia and Luca board “La Bestia”, the series of trains that migrants ride atop to reach “El Norte” and escape to their new life in America. They make some friends and suffer much trauma along the way. All the while they are looking over their shoulders, waiting for the inevitable moment when they feel Javier’s cold grip on them. And because this is the whole point of the book, obviously there is some payoff to this.
Except there isn’t! He never does catch up to them! They never do have to face off with one of his henchmen. The best we get is a video call Lydia makes once she has crossed the desert into America. I can hardly fathom how this book goes so far without this essential confrontation. Because it’s not like this is a short book. Off the 450 pages we had plenty of paranoia, and spades of quite boring travel, mostly without description at all, let alone vividity. There is also talk of how hard there life will be once they reach the US, because this is not a fairy-tale and migrants still have it tough. However in the epilogue we see how they actually don’t have it tough, and have slotted nicely into American society without much upset (other than the disappointment that Luca isn’t allowed to participate in the Geography Bee but he is undocumented). So was this a page-tuner? It was not. Was it interesting? Not really.
I found out something interesting once I had finished the book. I had been looking at the name Jeanine Cummins and thinking “That is not a very Mexican name”, and “That woman in the author’s picture doesn’t look very Mexican”. I shrugged it off because these things aren’t always apparent. However it turns out she has nothing to do with Mexico, and has been severely criticised for writing “trauma porn” that she has no right to write. Seemingly not because she’s white, but more because she doesn’t do it very well. Oh well, I don’t need to get into that. All I know is that it wasn’t a very enjoyable book.
The book follows Lydia and Luca, mother and son who are all that remains of their murdered family. We start in media res as they hide in a bathroom while all 16 members of their family are gunned down outside while having a picturesque barbecue. The cartel did this, and they want to finish the job and end their lives too. So Lydia and Luca hit the road, trusting no-one, and deeply aware of the cartels’ reach in every aspect of Mexican life. And Lydia is actually friends with the cartel boss Javier – he became a regular in her bookshop and began to fall in love with her. She was married though, and her husband was the journalist that wrote the headline-grabbing exposé of Javier’s evil-doings that drove his daughter to suicide. Hence the vendetta.
Eventually Lydia and Luca board “La Bestia”, the series of trains that migrants ride atop to reach “El Norte” and escape to their new life in America. They make some friends and suffer much trauma along the way. All the while they are looking over their shoulders, waiting for the inevitable moment when they feel Javier’s cold grip on them. And because this is the whole point of the book, obviously there is some payoff to this.
Except there isn’t! He never does catch up to them! They never do have to face off with one of his henchmen. The best we get is a video call Lydia makes once she has crossed the desert into America. I can hardly fathom how this book goes so far without this essential confrontation. Because it’s not like this is a short book. Off the 450 pages we had plenty of paranoia, and spades of quite boring travel, mostly without description at all, let alone vividity. There is also talk of how hard there life will be once they reach the US, because this is not a fairy-tale and migrants still have it tough. However in the epilogue we see how they actually don’t have it tough, and have slotted nicely into American society without much upset (other than the disappointment that Luca isn’t allowed to participate in the Geography Bee but he is undocumented). So was this a page-tuner? It was not. Was it interesting? Not really.
I found out something interesting once I had finished the book. I had been looking at the name Jeanine Cummins and thinking “That is not a very Mexican name”, and “That woman in the author’s picture doesn’t look very Mexican”. I shrugged it off because these things aren’t always apparent. However it turns out she has nothing to do with Mexico, and has been severely criticised for writing “trauma porn” that she has no right to write. Seemingly not because she’s white, but more because she doesn’t do it very well. Oh well, I don’t need to get into that. All I know is that it wasn’t a very enjoyable book.