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brice_mo 's review for:
Detained: A boy's journal of survival and resilience
by D. Esperanza, Gerardo Iván Morales
Thanks to NetGalley and Atria for the ARC!
D. Esperanza and Gerardo Iván Morales’s Detained is a conundrum of a book, presenting itself as a self-aware Diary of Anne Frank for the horrors of American immigration.
But Anne Frank didn’t have a co-author. (More on that in a moment.)
Detained is such a tricky book to review because it knows it’s important. The way the United States treats undocumented immigrants is depraved, and we do need books that shed light on detention centers and the cruelty that festers there.
For the first part of the book, Esperanza’s teenaged voice effectively guides the reader through his journey from Honduras to Guatemala to Mexico to the US, and all the grief along the way is mediated through the eyes of a child. The descriptions hurt more because they are allusive, often forcing the reader to draw their own conclusions about what this young boy witnessed—we receive Esperanza’s experiences, not their interpretation.
Upon Esperanza’s arrival at the detention center, however, something strange happens.
In the center, our narrator meets Iván, his mentor and Detained’s translator, and the book’s voice takes a dramatic shift. Or, more accurately, it shifts to the dramatic. D. suddenly writes with a precocious self-awareness and performed naiveté, always understanding the political significance of his position while dumbing it down. Everything is turned up to 11 so that a point is made, and this hyperbole betrays the book—Esperanza’s experience becomes less important than its interpretation.
I can't say for certain, but it feels fairly apparent to me that Morales, as many writing teachers do, pushed Esperanza to make certain sections more “powerful,” but in doing so, he reduces the author to an object lesson. It’s as if he needs to assert “childhood innocence” because he doesn’t fully believe—or think readers will believe—that immigrants are innocent, regardless of status. It gets a bit messier when Morales is constantly portrayed as a savior, issuing platitudes like, “Everyone is fighting for you.”
To be clear, I don’t doubt the evil that animates detention centers, and I don’t doubt that Morales has played a huge role in D. Esperanza’s life.
I do, however, struggle with the fact that the most powerful parts of the book are where Morales is most distant, and I think it highlights how activism can inhibit action. His insistence on abstract importance mutes the immediacy of Esperanza’s personal significance. We should care about immigration policy because of how it impacts people, rather than caring about people because of what they indicate about immigration policy.
Furthermore, in this post-truth political climate, I think it feels dangerous to flirt with artifice. When the perverse behavior of ICE and DHS is sustained by lies, we need radical truth, not feel-good “and everybody clapped” kinds of rhetoric. Much of what’s written in Detained would be excellent in another form, but it’s disingenuous (and maybe dangerous) in a “child’s memoir.”
This one was a disappointment.
D. Esperanza and Gerardo Iván Morales’s Detained is a conundrum of a book, presenting itself as a self-aware Diary of Anne Frank for the horrors of American immigration.
But Anne Frank didn’t have a co-author. (More on that in a moment.)
Detained is such a tricky book to review because it knows it’s important. The way the United States treats undocumented immigrants is depraved, and we do need books that shed light on detention centers and the cruelty that festers there.
For the first part of the book, Esperanza’s teenaged voice effectively guides the reader through his journey from Honduras to Guatemala to Mexico to the US, and all the grief along the way is mediated through the eyes of a child. The descriptions hurt more because they are allusive, often forcing the reader to draw their own conclusions about what this young boy witnessed—we receive Esperanza’s experiences, not their interpretation.
Upon Esperanza’s arrival at the detention center, however, something strange happens.
In the center, our narrator meets Iván, his mentor and Detained’s translator, and the book’s voice takes a dramatic shift. Or, more accurately, it shifts to the dramatic. D. suddenly writes with a precocious self-awareness and performed naiveté, always understanding the political significance of his position while dumbing it down. Everything is turned up to 11 so that a point is made, and this hyperbole betrays the book—Esperanza’s experience becomes less important than its interpretation.
I can't say for certain, but it feels fairly apparent to me that Morales, as many writing teachers do, pushed Esperanza to make certain sections more “powerful,” but in doing so, he reduces the author to an object lesson. It’s as if he needs to assert “childhood innocence” because he doesn’t fully believe—or think readers will believe—that immigrants are innocent, regardless of status. It gets a bit messier when Morales is constantly portrayed as a savior, issuing platitudes like, “Everyone is fighting for you.”
To be clear, I don’t doubt the evil that animates detention centers, and I don’t doubt that Morales has played a huge role in D. Esperanza’s life.
I do, however, struggle with the fact that the most powerful parts of the book are where Morales is most distant, and I think it highlights how activism can inhibit action. His insistence on abstract importance mutes the immediacy of Esperanza’s personal significance. We should care about immigration policy because of how it impacts people, rather than caring about people because of what they indicate about immigration policy.
Furthermore, in this post-truth political climate, I think it feels dangerous to flirt with artifice. When the perverse behavior of ICE and DHS is sustained by lies, we need radical truth, not feel-good “and everybody clapped” kinds of rhetoric. Much of what’s written in Detained would be excellent in another form, but it’s disingenuous (and maybe dangerous) in a “child’s memoir.”
This one was a disappointment.