American Dirt

I loved this. So engaging and fast paced. I understand that the critics are upset that this book based in Mexico about immigrants was written by a white person. However, from my understanding, the parts that are fact based are correct and well researched. I am glad somebody told this story and gave life to the immigrants who lost their lives trying to leave a dangerous life 🫶🏻 truly amazing. I think everyone should read this!!!

What a pertinent read. A book in which the circumstances of the events when written have only proceeded to decline. It makes you wonder, it makes me wonder. How many more coyotes are in existence, how many more have died, been maimed, been forced into being sex slaves. It’s insanity, it’s sobering, it’s a story, sure. But it is most definitely NOT fiction.

Heartbreaking, faith stealing, humanity breaking, hopeful, beautiful, uncompromising. Hard to really pinpoint feels after a book like this, all that i think needs saying is that it’s worth the read.

I could only get through 20 pages before I had to put it down. Too much showing rather than telling. Not appealing prose to me. Maybe one day I'll pick it back up but Everytime there was italicized Spanish I visually winced.

Also went into it knowing that it was a white woman telling the story, definitely influenced my opinion to stop so early as I had little optimism that the story was going to really push any boundaries for the narrative/ be worth reading when there are other options.

Each criticism of American Dirt seems to fall on one of two sides: 1. The book relies so much on stereotypes that is essentializes the experience of Central American migrants and only panders to the simplistic imagination of white American readers with a shallow understanding of Central American conflict and a casual interest in social justice. 2. The book has follows a plot so unrepresentative of the experience of most Central American migrants that it fails to accurately, realistically portray the authentic experiences and horrors of migrants and asylum seekers. It's a difficult thing, exploring a landscape full of families and business owners and schoolchildren and joy that's also a landscape of violence and corruption so extreme that people flee to the dismal capitalist wasteland of the United States. I'm not sure if there's any way to do it without falling in one of those two directions above, unless you have the cred as an author to say, "I actually experienced this." Jeanine Cummins didn't, and that's the common ground those two separate criticisms often rest on. This opens a whole can of worms about who is entitled to tell certain stories and when it's okay to not "write what you know" and even who is entitled to present criticism (or praise) for a book. I'm still thinking on this, two years after my initial read, and I don't have very clear answers. I've read snippets of Cummins's interviews that don't really make me sympathetic to her amidst the controversy, but I generally don't take into account the author's words or actions outside the novel when giving stars (see my review of Jurassic Park from earlier this year). Anyway. The italicized Spanish is cheap. The characters are moderately complex at best. But for a plot-driven novel (not always my thing!), I found the pace really engaging. The story tugged at me. It opened productive conversations with people I know who had never really considered the reality of migrants beyond the "caravans" they saw on a certain "news" channel (obviously, it shouldn't take this book to do that, but it can).

American dirt tells the story of a mother and a son embarking on a tumultuous journey from Mexico to the US due to cartel violence. I have to say this book started it off so strong and was so quick paced it was easily a page turner for me, but towards the middle to the end it lost its grappling story telling and became way too descriptive. The characters felt very one dimensional and upon seeing that the author was a white woman and not a latino woman i was a bit disappointed. This story although important looses its authenticity in migration issues for mexicans. I still think the main themes are important and the thriller like writing made it compelling to continue reading. I definitely recommend the read though.

Utterly heart-breaking and compelling Without a doubt, one of the most powerful books I've read. The journey that this mother and her son go on shouldn't have to be made by anyone. It really puts you into the shoes of those who have nothing else to live for and simply MUST travel to survive. Read my full review over at www.lukeharkness.con

It's realistically 1.5 stars, it didn't live up to the big money publishing hype that is was marketed as. A coworker lent me this book after I talked about the drama surrounding it. Overall, it's a fairly generic thriller plot line (mother and child running away from the bad guys, in peril, etc.) in a politically charged setting, and overly descriptive. The characterization is also very inconsistent. Luca, 8 years old, is a good example for this. Sometimes it reads as if he's 4 years old, other times he's referring to "the boundaries of time that have always existed". This plot could have been set anywhere, it didn't need to be told from the Mexican migrant perspective. The author's note points out her husband was undocumented immigrant, from Ireland. She could have easily written this as a thriller as an Irish immigrant novel, but she chose to write this story when she didn't need to. This book probably makes Americans feel better about reading a book about the migrant experience, while really doing nothing else about it. It could have been an impactful story, but reading this, knowing the criticism and backlash, it would have been better from a Latinx voice. There ARE better books written from latinx voices. The entire time I read this I could really only read it through the lens that a privileged white woman wrote it. However, it did make me look up Latinx authors to read and want to make an effort to read them in the future. All the criticism you read about this book is fair and justified.

Some books just open up gates to new worlds, ready for you to explore. I am reading books only for the past couple of years, and some books are truly an eye-opener. Even though there are stereotypes present, and this might not be a perfect work of writing (based on what some experts say), the book surely introduced me into the world of border crossing and immigration. I'd surely start looking at this issue in a totally different way, and that's what is good about this book. Being a brown immigrant (India), I totally get the misrepresentation part (Slumdog Millionaire and many other movies) and being under-represented (in Literature, movies etc.). But, the conversation has to start somewhere. Loved the Oprah's follow up discussion on Apple TV - do watch if you read the book. Next on the reading list: Enrique's Journey.

Heartbreaking and exhilarating in equal measure. This book brings to life the atrocities committed by Mexican cartels and the destruction they leave in their wake, but also shows the power of a mother’s love and the inspiring human condition to persevere. It was a bit lengthy, however kept my attention from start to finish.

reviewing and rating so gr stops recommending this piece of shit book to me x

Absolutely fantastic rollercoaster of a read.

Tangential often, felt like it could’ve been even 100 pages shorter and conveyed the same effective plot & themes.

This book was good, however rather long for me. I felt it either could have been shortened or maybe do a switch of perspective to Luca or Soledad or Rebecca. I wanted to know more about the supporting characters and I wasn’t getting that.

It's realistically 1.5 stars, it didn't live up to the big money publishing hype that is was marketed as. A coworker lent me this book after I talked about the drama surrounding it. Overall, it's a fairly generic thriller plot line (mother and child running away from the bad guys, in peril, etc.) in a politically charged setting, and overly descriptive. The characterization is also very inconsistent. Luca, 8 years old, is a good example for this. Sometimes it reads as if he's 4 years old, other times he's referring to "the boundaries of time that have always existed".

This plot could have been set anywhere, it didn't need to be told from the Mexican migrant perspective. The author's note points out her husband was undocumented immigrant, from Ireland. She could have easily written this as a thriller as an Irish immigrant novel, but she chose to write this story when she didn't need to. This book probably makes Americans feel better about reading a book about the migrant experience, while really doing nothing else about it. It could have been an impactful story, but reading this, knowing the criticism and backlash, it would have been better from a Latinx voice. There ARE better books written from latinx voices. The entire time I read this I could really only read it through the lens that a privileged white woman wrote it.

However, it did make me look up Latinx authors to read and want to make an effort to read them in the future. All the criticism you read about this book is fair and justified.

I had some high expectations for this book but found it to be disappointing. I’ve mentioned many times that I frequently have a hard time finding the right words to articulate how I feel about a book. I have to genuinely push myself to get how I feel into a cohesive piece. This is going to be one of those reviews. This has been a hugely talked about book, from people who absolutely loved it and felt it was an accurate portrayal of the need to flee from Mexican drug cartels; but also from people who felt this is pretty much as fiction as fiction gets. I know nothing of what life is like for those living in fear of the cartels, and I really don’t know much about the process of trying to get into America. This woman and her son are on the run, scared for their lives after the horrific massacre of her entire family. I found that entire scene to be unbearably gory (I debated over divulging that…it makes me sound like an old lady). It’s hard to want to like a book when it starts with the heartless murdering of so many people, including children. Unfortunately, the entire book continues with similar violence and tragedy. Nothing good seems to happen to these people, and it was just sad. The whole book was sad. While I understand that was the point, I just didn’t like it. Maybe it was when I read it? Like I should not read unbelievably sad books when I’m living in the middle of a long, dreary winter and possibly dealing with seasonal depression. I should have read it in July. Regardless, I didn’t love it.

I will admit this book was eye opening for me in that I need to be better as a reader in researching the author before reading books. I blindly assumed it was written by someone who was Mexican or Central American, and I recognize that’s not a way to go about reading books. It’s hard toggling this because I do think this is a story that needs to be told. As someone who grew up in the southwest the bigotry towards immigrants is blatant and I wish more people would read and hear about immigrant stories.

3.5 rounded up for the author’s ability to keep me listening and wondering what would happen next. Otherwise a 3.0 for this somewhat improbable telling of a woman and her 8-year-old son surviving a gang massacre and going on the run to El Norte.

controversial book but it hooked me

I'll be frank: I didn't want to read this book. I've been spending the last year-plus reading a lot of books written by authors of color, queer authors and, generally, voices that are not often amplified, so I really wasn't interested in reading a white woman's take on the immigrant experience. But alas, the book club I help manage at work chose this as part of an observance of Hispanic Heritage Month (*grumble*) and after toying with the idea of just not participating, I decided I would read it and see what all the fuss was about. Well, a few chapters in I forgot all about the racial controversy surrounding the book because I was too overwhelmed with how poorly this novel was written: the muddiness of the narrative, the clunky use of Spanish words, the melodramatic plot elements and the bland central character. I suppose I shouldn't have been that surprised because, if this had been a well-written book, the controversy probably wouldn't have hit the fever pitch it did. But it's not. It's really quite bad. A few things that irked me while reading American Dirt: - The use of Spanish. I've read books written in English about Spanish-speaking characters, written by Spanish-speaking authors. It's not uncommon to weave the Spanish language into the narrative, but with quality writing, there is a purpose to it. Words are generally chosen because their Spanish versions have no real English translation or the Spanish version means something different than the English translation would. But Cummins sprinkles Spanish throughout the pages of her book like dashes of hot sauce, meant to lend some kind of hollow authenticity to her half-baked attempt at bringing migrant pain to the masses. There's is no reason for balon (ball), futbol (soccer...or football) or pollo (chicken) to appear in Spanish and italics. It's clumsy, distracting and unnecessary. - The muddy and unfocused narrative. American Dirt is told via a third-person narrative that clings tightly to whichever character Cummins decides to focus on at that particularly moment. Most of the time it's her central protagonist Lydia, but sometimes it's her young son Luca, or a fellow migrant they meet on their journeys, or a nurse at a hospital in Honduras hundreds of miles away, or the coyote that's taking them across the border. The switches between narratives can be very sudden and jarring and, while most of the characters have far more compelling and interesting stories than Lydia (though still littered with stereotypes), Lydia is the character Cummins has chosen to focus on, yet she seems about as bored as I was with her as she flits between the lives and perspectives of others throughout the book. It'd be one thing if the third-person narrative had a broad narrative-eyed viewpoint from the get go, but it's intensely intimate from the get-go, making the jumps away from Lydia rough, rather than a fluid story that glides between its subjects. - The choice of heroine. As I said above, Lydia is not a great main character. She's bland and broadly drawn and, despite having been born, raised and lived in Mexico her entire life, she reads like a middle-aged, middle-class, white American mother from top to bottom—an obvious cypher for the Oprah Book Club readers this book was clearly aimed at from the start. Cummins claimed that she wanted to put a human face on migrants coming to America, but her choice of focal point character looks like very little of the migrant population. A well-educated Mexican business owner who sets out on her journey to the states with wallet full of pesos and a bank card giving her access to several thousand more is not the face of the average migrant. Cummins clearly knows this because she populates Lydia and her son's journey with faces that more accurately represent migrant population, in particular, those coming from Central America, not Mexico. While reading I was constantly asking the question, "Why is this book about Lydia and not these indigenous Honduran sisters, Soledad and Rebeca. Why not Marisol, the woman who had lived in the U.S. for years and was deported and desperately trying to get back to her two teenage daughters living in San Diego?" The answer seems obvious: Cummins wanted someone the middle-class, middle-aged white American women she was writing this book for to have someone they could latch on to, someone like them. I find this to be not only a poor storytelling choice, but a cynical judgment of her audience, that they could only feel empathy for migrants if it happened to someone like them. - The melodrama. The author claims to want to put a human face on migrants, yet her characters are awash in soap opera-style storytelling. The self-serious tone of the migrant journey is cheapened by the ridiculous addition of Lydia's personal relationship with the cartel boss she and her son are running from. It feels like something out of a telenovela and every time it comes up it grates with the rest of the world Cummins is creating, culminating in a final send off to that particular plot line that is wholly unnecessary and just so badly done. - The tragedy porn. Obviously, bloodshed, death and rape are dangers in the migrant journey, but the way they are used in American Dirt often feels cheap. It begins with the opening massacre and continues with assaults on teenage girls and a some murders of, at best, tertiary characters along the way. Aside from the deaths of Lydia's mother and husband (this is not a spoiler, it's in the first pages of the book), most of these horrible instances have little to no personal impact on our main character and thus, they have little emotional impact on us, the readers. It's borrowed pain to illustrate the stakes of the journey without having Lydia or her son touched directly by it. There is some talk of the emotional scars they will carry with them, but it's just that, talk. Lydia and Luca's wounds, both physical and psychological, pale in comparison to that of those they have traveled alongside, both before their journey north and after it. They are touched by privilege throughout the story, bystanders to worst traumas of Cummins's interpretation of the migrant experience, never able to bring us close to it. In the end, Cummins is not interested in visiting any real pain on her protagonist (outside of the inciting incident of the novel), only the less fortunate that surround her. Before I sign off, I do want to note one thing that I appreciated about this book (hence the second star). Cummins mentions in her acknowledgements that the loss of her father lead to the grief that is woven throughout this book and, when she allows herself to tap into those emotions, there are rare moments of authenticity in American Dirt. This is especially true when she writes about the impact the death of Lydia's father had on her and how it changed her (though, somewhat oddly, it's told more through the lens of her dead husband than through Lydia herself). It can also be found, at times, when Lydia's son Luca grapples with the reality that he has just lost his own father. While there is a lot of loss throughout the book, not all of it has this same sense of authenticity, some of it is very quickly brushed away. But anyone that's lost someone important to them will identify the points where Cummins is putting her own experiences with grief on the page. In those brief passages, there's a transcendence of the airport novel schlock that makes up the rest of the novel. But these moments are frustratingly brief and sparse, impactful though they are.

Such a good read. Crammed in the last 100 pages because I wanted to know how it ended so badly!

A heart wrenching novel from start to finish. The way Jeanine Cummins writes is poetic and beautiful, and she knows how to keep the readers on the edge of their seat. The only criticism I have is the omniscient narration which caused some confusion in certain scenes. If each chapter was told from the different POVs rather than mixed in all at once, I think it would’ve read more fluidly.

I am not sure I agree with the controversy surrounding this book. I thought it was a good read. Not the most amazing thing I have ever read, but written well and compelling. I also thought it was believable. As a white woman, the migrant experience is completely foreign to me, but it is very real for my in-laws. They know real people who have suffered similarly, just to get to America. So all the people saying this is melodramatic...I promise you it is not. The journey Luca and Lydia took, though fictional, has roots in reality and is quite real. There have been many negative reviews of this book, condemning it as a racist portrayal of Mexico, but the truth is that immigration is a very scary and dangerous situation for many in Mexico. To ask the author to downplay the harsh reality of cartels and La Bestia and coyotes would have been even worse. Not every Mexican shares Lydia's experience ... but some do. Which is why I think that, even though it is fictional, this was a real story. I enjoyed it, learned from it, but also understand that one story is not every story.

3.5 rounded up for the author’s ability to keep me listening and wondering what would happen next. Otherwise a 3.0 for this somewhat improbable telling of a woman and her 8-year-old son surviving a gang massacre and going on the run to El Norte.

** spoiler alert ** Such an amazing, moving book! Every chapter unveiled a fresh horror, but it was written in such a beautiful and moving way, you didn’t want to put it down. I read it slowly to savour the story, and each character and all the depth they had. It taught me so much about the migrant experience, and how truly horrible it is. I loved Soledad and Rebeca, and the weight of their beauty. The descriptions of their home town were so gorgeous and evocative. Luca was such a strong little guy, and I wished for a much better ending for Beto. Lydia is the strongest mom! A must read for all North Americans.