My Take on American Dirt

Lydia Delgado knows, even as she calls them to report the carnage, that she cannot trust the police. Sixteen family members lie dead in the back yard where Lydia's husband Sebastian was manning the grill at a quinceanera celebration. She and their eight-year-old son Luca were in the bathroom when the bloodbath began. And there but for goodness...

Acapulco is a dangerous place, especially for journalists like Sebastian, shining a light on the insidious power of the drug cartels. As solidly middle class Mexicans, Lydia and Sebastian believe they have successfully shielded themselves and

Luca from the worst that men can do. But when Lydia's flirtation and ultimately deepening friendship with Javier, a patron at her upscale bookstore, results in Sebastian's writing an in-depth piece on the jefe of Los Jardineros, known as La Lechuza, a Pandora's box of suffering opens.

Convinced that Javier will not rest until they, too, are dead, Lydia sets out on the tortuous path traveled by hundreds of thousands before them, joining a caravan of immigrants from all classes and countries seeking safe haven in el norte. You'd have to be living under a rock not to be familiar with the controversy surrounding this novel. Labeled "trauma porn" by critics, Cummins' book has been disparaged as inauthentic though she is married to a green card holder who was for years an undocumented immigrant. She and her family have been vilified and threatened. For wanting to shed a light on a humanitarian crisis, for trying to put relatable faces on the streams of nameless, faceless, immigrants who arrive at our southern border each day, Cummins has had to go into hiding.

I found this novel to be a deeply moving meditation on motherhood and trust. Lydia's survival instinct and the ferocious love she has for her precocious, delightful Luca, compel the story forward. She shocks herself at her ability to lie, steal, even murder if she has to. With no time to grieve the deaths of her husband or her mother, every ounce of energy must be applied to survival. She can trust no one and that loss of innocence might be the most tragic loss of all. Along their way, they will meet the worst and the best that humanity has to offer.

"American Dirt" answers the question that so many people ask either out of ignorance or mean spiritedness. 

"Why would they risk it all, their very lives, to come here?"

Each character in this ultimately hopeful novel represents a reason.

Go to her website to learn how you can help. https://www.jeaninecummins.com/how-to-helppre/