Occasionally there’s a flare of deeper, more subtle characterization, the way Luca, for example, experiences “an uncomfortable feeling of both thrill and dread” when he finally lays eyes on the other side of the border, or how, in the middle of the terror of escape, Lydia will still notice that her son needs a haircut. Like a government furlough, God has deferred her nonessential agencies”). “American Dirt” was written with good intentions, and like all deeply felt books, it calls its imagined ghosts into the reader’s real flesh. In one scene, the sisters embrace and console each other: “Rebeca breathes deeply into Soledad’s neck, and her tears wet the soft brown curve of her sister’s skin.” In all my years of hugging my own sister, I don’t think I’ve ever thought, “Here I am, hugging your brown neck.” Am I missing out? Shouldn’t the story matter, her effort to individuate people portrayed as a “faceless brown mass” (her words)? I kept turning the pages, following Lydia and Luca, the mother and son, as they flee through Mexico, gathering a misfit band of other migrants. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. And it's harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama. The boy is in the bathroom when the first bullet comes whistling through the window. They take up with a street-smart boy carrying a disconcerting amount of cash, and two young women, sisters whose beauty becomes a harrowing liability. ‘American Dirt’ Plunges Readers Into the Border Crisis. Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times. American Dirt first landed on the desks of editors in the spring of 2018. Sleepless, grieving, paranoid, seeing the cartel’s henchmen everywhere, Lydia schemes their way to La Bestia, the treacherous freight trains migrants use to travel the length of Mexico, and finds a coyote to lead them north. Los Jardineros, as they call themselves, have a taste for baroque punishments and are helmed by a charismatic kingpin. The major objection to cultural appropriation has always been about the abuse of power: inadequate research, halfhearted imagination and a lack of respect, the privileged assumption of the right to speak on behalf of people who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. The story of a mother and son’s desperate attempt to flee Mexico for America, it arrives on a gust of rapturous and demented praise — anointed “The Grapes of Wrath” for our time, “required reading for all Americans.”, [ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of 2020. This book opened my mind and touched my heart. Allow me to take this one for the team. We learn that Lydia had been a bookstore owner, the wife of a journalist who infuriated the wrong people, and Luca a tiny prodigy of geography. Fiction is the art of delicately sketching the internal lives of others, of richly and believably projecting readers into lives not their own. She and her 8-year-old son are the only survivors. Cummins has put in the research, as she describes in her afterword, and the scenes on La Bestia are vividly conjured. También de este lado hay sueños. Lydia, meanwhile, ran a bookshop. Beautifully written, thrilling in its propulsive force, American Dirt is a new American classic.” —Tara Conklin, author of the New York Times bestseller The Last Romantics “The story of the migrant is the story of our times, and Jeanine Cummins is a worthy chronicler. What thin creations these characters are — and how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations. “Footsteps in the kitchen. In the end, I find myself deeply ambivalent. 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