American Dirt

This book (despite being a novel, unlike my other recommendations) taught me so much about a migration route I was less familiar with.

Coming from the UK, my work has been naturally Europe-centric and focuses on migration routes from The Middle East and East Africa to Northern Europe.

This book highlights the journey of a family crossing Mexico to get to America, and it blew my mind. I couldn’t put it down and was so invested in the characters' safe arrival to their final destination. 

I was intensely moved by the vivid, harrowing portrayal of what people go through in attempting to reach our border and the author’s ability to keep the point of view within the character’s experience, centering on the “showing” and minimizing the “telling.”

The pacing was great. I found myself caught up in the narrator’s journey from beginning to end, and I also gained a deeper understanding of what people actually go through. All of this made the book very worthwhile and important to read despite the controversy surrounding the appropriateness of a white author writing about a Latina woman.

American Dirt begins with a bang, literally, a violent and shocking scene that nearly put me off.

If I’d been reading on the page, I think I might not have continued, as I don’t enjoy violence, but, as I was listening on Audible, I gave it a bit longer. And soon I was utterly, almost uncomfortably, hooked. The gripping need to continue listening hardly let up for an instant all the way through to the satisfying and nuanced ending.

As well as being a truly compelling story, this novel really opened my imagination to the plight of people who are… show more.

Lydia, who lived in Acapulco, finds herself on the run with her only child, Lucas, due to the recent murder of her husband and feeling threatened herself. It is a timely book considering the countless number of people trying to enter the US—some of them fearing for their very lives. Although fiction, it was inspired by real-life people with real-life issues and how a mother will do anything to protect her child. As a mother of four, I understood I would do anything to protect my children. It was easy and yet painful to put myself in Lydia’s position as… show more.

This book rocked my world.

Lydia and her young son begin a harrowing journey from Mexico to the United States after being targeted for death by a drug cartel. American Dirt has everything I relish in a story: a riveting plot, top-notch writing, believable characters, and spot-on dialogue. What’s more, it drives home the plight of migrants in a way that news stories can’t. I didn’t just read this book; I lived it. I became that desperate mother. And I too would trek across deserts and leap onto moving trains to save my child.

Lydia Quixano Perez is every mother living every mother’s darkest nightmare when her journalist husband and family are murdered by narcoterrorists in Mexico. Forced to flee at a moment’s notice for America with her young son, Lydia is transformed from a prosperous middle-class woman into a desperate migrant fighting to survive the desperate journey to freedom and safety. What most shone to me in this novel is the clever way Cummins transforms a narco novel into a story of a mother’s relationship with her young son and her determination to deliver him from evil.

This book grabbed me right from the first page. Lydia and her young son, Luca, are on the run from a cartel leader who has killed her family. They are trying to make it to American soil to avoid the cartel’s reach. As they trek across the Mexican desert, they find that the cartel leader, Javier, has spies everywhere looking for them. They can trust no one and you can be assured that every page will be full of tension. Beautifully written.