Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:   Jeanine Cummins

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign

400 pages, published January 21, 2020

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

American Dirt tells the horrific story of Lydia Pérez and her eight-year-old son Luca who must flee for their lives in Acapulco after Lydia’s journalist husband Javier and her entire family are brutally murdered by a ruthless drug cartel.  Lydia and Luca encounter many incredible difficulties as they try to make their way to the safety of American dirt.

Quotes 

“That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.”

 

“[Author’s Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I’m interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I’m less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important – I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories are often overlooked.”

 

“she was a book lover who enjoyed reading aloud to her baby. She liked the idea that, even before he understood them, he might begin with the most beautiful words, that he’d build language from a foundation of literature and poetry.”

 

“They hike almost three miles without incident, and it’s amazing to watch the colors leach back into the desert after the day’s blanching. There’s a moment, Lydia realizes, or no, more than a moment – a span of perhaps fifteen minutes just at twilight – when the desert is the most perfect place that exists. The temperature, the light, the colors, all hang and linger at some unflawed precipice, like the cars of a roller coaster ticking ever so slowly over their apex before the crash. The light droops ever farther from the sky, and Lydia can smell the heat of the day wicking away from her skin.”

 

“Bookstores, invariably, are a refuge. There’s one in the town where they live, and the first time Lydia ventures in, it takes her breath away. She has to steady herself against a shelf. The smell of coffee and paper and ink. It’s nothing like her little shop back home. It’s stocked mostly with religious books, and instead of calendars and toys, they carry rosaries, Buddha figurines, yarmulkes. Still, the upright spines of the books are bedrock. Steady. There’s an international poetry section. Hafiz. Heaney. Neruda. Lydia flips past the twenty love poems and reads “The Song of Despair.” She reads it desperately, hungrily, bent over the books in the aisle of the quiet shop. Her fingers ready the next page while she devours the words. The book is water in the desert.”

My Take

American Dirt is a compelling page turner.  Author Jeanine Cummins put in a lot of research to get the facts right of the drug cartels and the migrants who travel to el norte and it shows in this book.  She transports you along with Lydia and Luca as they make their horrific journey to the United States.  An eye-opening, well told story that I highly recommend.