What thin creations these characters are — and how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations. If you’ve been online in the past few months, you’ve probably seen ads for American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’ heavily promoted new novel about Mexican-American … At the same time, other Mexican-American and Latina writers are speaking out in support of the book, people like Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez and Erika Sánchez. ... Rita Woods, is a Black woman, which meant her work was even less likely to get review attention than other new books. Cummins’s stated intention is not to speak for migrants but to speak while standing next to them, loudly enough to be heard by people who don’t want to hear. The heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous. In these reviews and letter signed by 142 writers, Cummins ... stating in a December 2015 New York Times opinion piece: "I still don't want to write about race. “Footsteps in the kitchen. 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. The novel opens into a tense and vivid scene in Acapulco, the massacre of an entire Mexican family during a quinceañera cookout. It’s as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they’re all pulling at once. “American Dirt” is written for people like me, those native to the United States who are worried about what is happening at our southern border but who have never felt the migrants’ fear and desperation in their own bodies. She’s donated money. Los Jardineros, as they call themselves, have a taste for baroque punishments and are helmed by a charismatic kingpin. MARTIN: "American Dirt" is the story of a Mexican woman named Lydia. The caveat is to do this work of representation responsibly, and well. The book’s simple language immerses the reader immediately and breathlessly in the terror and difficulty of Lydia and Luca’s flight. ... “American Dirt,” a new novel by Jeanine Cummins, has been positioned as a breakout hit of the year. Admiring American girls for their bodies, Fowler insists to himself that they could not possibly be capable of "untidy passion." In the end, I find myself deeply ambivalent. The ragtag family lurches forward. They ultimately find themselves in Nogales, where they must cross the desert by foot at night with a coyote to arrive in the United States. They are robbed by corrupt police officers. Then there are the real masterpieces, where the writing grows so lumpy and strange it sounds like nonsense poetry. American Dirt first landed on the desks of editors in the spring of 2018. Review: Compelling ‘American Dirt’ humanizes a migration tale with care. 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. [ Read an excerpt from “American Dirt.” ]. I couldn’t put it down. Allow me to take this one for the team. It is determinedly apolitical. ... 30 January 2020. Vivid, visceral, utterly compelling, AMERICAN DIRT is an unforgettable story of a mother and son's attempt to cross the US-Mexico border. Problem 1: The Author. But when Gurba took an advanced review copy of “American Dirt” to read while visiting Guadalajara, Mexico, during a week-long Thanksgiving break from teaching, warning signs appeared even before turning the first page. They hear gunfire in the backyard, where the rest of the family has been celebrating a child’s birthday party. Mami tugs her shirtsleeve over her hand, and Luca watches in horror as she leans away from him, toward that telltale splatter of blood. In the opening scene of the novel, her family is murdered by a drug cartel. 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. They are hunted by Los Jardineros, the cartel that killed Lydia’s family. A few pages into reading Jeanine Cummins’s third novel, “American Dirt,” I found myself so terrified that I had to pace my house. 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. There is a single clear moral voice entirely on the side of the migrants, because the book’s purpose is fiercely polemical, which I would have understood even without the author’s note in which Cummins writes that she intended “to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear,” so that people who are not migrants can “remember: These people are people.” Polemical fiction is not made to subvert expectations or to question the invisible architecture of the world; polemical fiction is designed to make its readers act in a way that corresponds to the writer’s vision. I found myself flinching as I read, not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English language receives. That expression. Cummins received a seven-figure advance for this book. The book is also slated for a movie adaptation by the writer of Blood Diamond. Described as 'impossible to put down' (Saturday Review) and 'essential reading' (Tracy Chevalier), it is a story that will leave you utterly changed. Sixteen people die that afternoon, murdered by the local drug cartel. Cummins' 2020 novel, American Dirt, ... a string of critical reviews was published, including a review in the New York Times. There is a fair amount of action in the book — chases, disguises, one thuddingly obvious betrayal — but if you’re at all sensitive to language, your eye and ear will snag on the sentences. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins - book review. In her afterword, Cummins relates that she did tremendous research, traveling extensively, interviewing many people, sitting with her material in utter seriousness for four years. American Dirt also garnered effusive praise leading up to its release. There is subtext announced at booming volume. This novel is aimed at people who have loved a child and who would fight with everything they have to see that child be allowed a good future. Still, writers like Myriam Gurba have brought up concerns with the novel, saying that it trucks in stereotypes of Mexico as a place of danger while the United States is always envisioned as a place of safety, that these stereotypes could inadvertently give fuel to the far right in their contempt for Mexicans. Rigoberto Gonzalez reviews Jeanine Cummins' 'American Dirt.' Books. I applaud Jeanine Cummins and I wholeheartedly recommend this book. For some, that’s a problem. ]. “American Dirt,” a new novel by Jeanine Cummins, has been positioned as a breakout hit of the year. That is what they are. A Mother and Son, Fleeing for Their Lives Over Treacherous Terrain, Jeanine Cummins, whose new novel is “American Dirt.”. 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. Of course he does; everything follows as predictably as possible. It’s true that because this book’s aims are polemical, its intended audience is clearly not the migrants described in it, who — having already lived its harrowing experience — would have no need to relive it in fiction. By immersing ourselves in the lives of fictional characters we gain emotional depth, breadth, and empathy. There are perplexing bird analogies (the beautiful sisters look at Lydia, “their expressions ranging like a quarrel of sparrows”; “Mami’s cry, a shrill, corporeal thing, it bubbles out of her like a fully formed bird and it flies, but Mami doesn’t”). “Getting it right matters way more than whether you can make people care,” she has said. When Sebastián publishes an exposé, the kingpin rewards him by slaughtering his family. The outrage has focused on Cummins, who is of mixed Irish and Puerto Rican heritage, writing about the Mexican and migrant experiences. 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? And it's harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama. This peculiar book flounders and fails. She decides to disguise herself and Luca as migrants and escape to America, until she realizes this is no disguise: “She and Luca are actual migrants. Yesterday, Lydia had a bookshop. In the book’s afterword, she agonizes about not being the right person to write the book (“I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”) but decides that she has a moral obligation to the story. She runs her sleeve over it, leaving behind only a faint smear, and then pitches back to him just as the man in the hallway uses the butt of his AK-47 to nudge the door the rest of the way open.”. Peter Sorel/New Line Cinema Edward Furlong, left, and Edward Norton in "American History X." I was further sunk into anxiety when I discovered that, although Cummins does have a personal stake in stories of migration, she herself is neither Mexican nor a migrant. Like a government furlough, God has deferred her nonessential agencies”). All her life she’s pitied those poor people. Writers can and should write about anything that speaks urgently to them, but they should put their work into the world only if they’re able to pull off their intentions responsibly. It begins — a journey of 1,600 miles over 18 days. 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. She and her 8-year-old son are the only survivors. I listened to it and the narrator is superb. 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. They have not affected me like American Dirt. Granted, any review I wrote of “American Dirt” was going to be negative. Hailed as "a Grapes of Wrath for our times" and "a new American classic", American Dirt is a rare exploration into the inner hearts of people willing to sacrifice everything for a glimmer of hope. The deep roots of these forced migrations are never interrogated; the American reader can read without fear of uncomfortable self-reproach. Yet the narrative is so swift, I don’t think I could have stopped reading. There are the strained similes (when Lydia finds she is unable to pray, “she believes it’s a divine kindness. The motives of the book may be unimpeachable, but novels must be judged on execution, not intention. The only survivors are a mother and her 8-year-old son, who must flee the narcos who spend the rest of the book hunting them down. See the full list. Why should this matter? According to the New York Times, nine publishers had bid on it, with Flatiron Books eventually winning, handing Cummins a seven-figure deal. When the boy’s mother tackles him so they can hide behind a shower wall in a bathroom, he bites his lip and a drop of blood splatters on the ground. The real failures of the book, however, have little to do with the writer’s identity and everything to do with her abilities as a novelist. But another, different, fear had also crept in as I was reading: I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book. In contemporary literary circles, there is a serious and legitimate sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant. Andrew Anglin . The boy is in the bathroom when the first bullet comes whistling through the window. When I think of the migrants at the border, suffering and desperate, I think of Lydia and Luca, and feel something close to bodily pain. ... but a month later, a review by the New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal set the internet ablaze. Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times. The intermittent rattle of bullets in the house. This stranger turns out to be the kingpin. The uncomplicated moral universe allows us to read it as a thriller with real-life stakes. … “American Dirt,” published last week, is a fast-paced novel about a mother-and-son pair of migrants on the run from murderous drug lords. As the novelist Hari Kunzru has argued, imagining ourselves into other lives and other subjectives is an act of ethical urgency. This is a list of adult fiction books that topped The New York Times Fiction Best Seller list in 2020, in the Combined Print & E-Book Fiction category. Book Summary. New York Times critic Parul Seghal, noting that American Dirt had been on the Times’s list of most anticipated 2020 books, departs from the “rapturous and demented praise” and “takes one for the team,” presumably the community of writers of color. The world of “American Dirt” is too urgent for humor or for much character development beyond Lydia’s own. As the anxiety-riddled mother of an 8-year-old — as a person who has nightmares after every report of a mass shooting — I felt this scene in the marrow of my bones. But does the book’s shallowness paradoxically explain the excitement surrounding it? Stephen King called it "extraordinary." The novel’s polemical architecture gives a single very forceful and efficient drive to the narrative. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. It asks only for us to accept that “these people are people,” while giving us the saintly to root for and the barbarous to deplore — and then congratulating us for caring. Review: Compelling ‘American Dirt’ humanizes a migration tale with care ... And in a New York Times … ‘American Dirt’ Plunges Readers Into the Border Crisis. Lydia’s expression “is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent. Lydia’s husband, Sebastián, slain on the patio, was a reporter who once fearlessly pursued stories about the cartel, which controlled Acapulco. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins review – a desperate Odyssey This gripping story of a mother and son on Mexico’s migrant trail combines humane intentions with propulsive, action-movie execution I was contractually bound to follow. Her life was quiet, content and enlivened recently by a new friendship with a patron, an older man, devastatingly suave (or so we’re meant to believe), who shared her taste in books. "American Dirt," the new novel by Jeanine Cummins, traces the journey a mother and son make to the US, after a cartel kills their family in a massacre at a quinceañera. “American Dirt” was written with good intentions, and like all deeply felt books, it calls its imagined ghosts into the reader’s real flesh. Bretty Gud Florida Man Headline. All of this is to say that “American Dirt” contains few of the aspects that I have long believed are necessary for successful literary fiction; yet if it did have them, this novel wouldn’t be nearly as propulsive as it is. The novel tells the story of a mother and son on Mexico's migrant trail in search of a new life. He has contempt for their bright vacuousness; yet Phuong, the comely Vietnamese, the only person in the world who means anything in his life, shows few qualities beyond self-interested compliance. The house is quiet now. I’m of the persuasion that fiction necessarily, even rather beautifully, requires imagining an “other” of some kind. I could never speak to the accuracy of the book’s representation of Mexican culture or the plights of migrants; I have never been Mexican or a migrant. There are so many instances and varieties of awkward syntax I developed a taxonomy. On this side too, there are dreams.. His mother pushes him into the shower stall, curves her body around his. The hallway that ends at the door of this bathroom is carpeted. Fiction is the art of delicately sketching the internal lives of others, of richly and believably projecting readers into lives not their own. Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt is a novel about a Mexican bookseller who has to escape cartel-related violence with her son, fleeing to the US. Let Us Help You Pick Your Next Book When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. American Dirtfollows the journey of a mother and son fleeing Mexico for America after their entire family is murdered on the orders of a local cartel kingpin. And the greatest animating spirit of the novel is the love between Lydia and Luca: It shines its blazing light on all the desperate migrants and feels true and lived. "American Dirt," a novel that is Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick, has sparked a bitter controversy over its author's identity and portrayal of … I’ll never stop thinking about it.” ―Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Dutch House and Commonwealth “Why do we read fiction? The journalist Katherine Boo, who wrote about a Mumbai slum in her National Book Award-winning “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” and has reported on poverty and disability, often speaks of the “earned fact” — the research necessary before making a claim. 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