American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

This was one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Like so many others, it’s touted as a #1 New York Times bestseller, but in this case, I can understand why. This was a page turner. This was a book I thought about when I wasn’t reading it and couldn’t wait to get back to it. The author is an excellent writer on multiple fronts. She’s good at the basics, like sentence structure and imagery, and she’s great at building suspense and keeping you engaged. I would have to pop ahead a few pages now and then to get the gist of what was going to happen, because I couldn’t live with the suspense sometimes. She made me feel like I was on the inside of the story. I felt less like an observer and more of a passenger in Lydia and Luca’s flight for life.

One of the things that impressed the crap out of me was how the author would illuminate ideas for me by sharing mini revelations through Lydia. For example, when Lydia is contemplating withdrawing money from an ATM at one point, but pauses, afraid that the action will make her trackable, she mentions that Luca doesn’t watch. She says he is picking at a sticker advertisement on a storefront window. She comments that in her life before they left home, she would have stopped him and gently reprimanded him for defacing the property of others, but now, she says nothing. She has fires to put out and there is no time for imparting etiquette lessons. That made me stop and think about when I see people letting their children behave in ways I wouldn’t tolerate. Maybe their circumstances are so dire, they can’t prioritize addressing those behaviors.

There is another moment like this when Lydia begins to understand what people actually do to reach the U.S. border. She says she remembers seeing news about them on television while she made dinner, and feeling concerned, until she realized she was missing an important ingredient in her dinner recipe. Then her attention turns to that problem, and she’s annoyed, anticipating her husband’s quiet disappointment when he realizes the dish doesn’t taste quite as good as usual. At that point, the fleeing immigrants leave her mind altogether while she stews over the missing dinner ingredient. The author’s attention to things like this along the way stunned and delighted me. It showcased how we get so wrapped up in our everyday things, that we fail terribly to see the big things and how our inattention happens so organically, so unavoidably.

The trek across the desert was so well described. I was racing through the pages to find out what happens and then backtracking to savor in the telling of it. When Lydia and Luca become disconnected from the group while she stops to retrieve dry socks from the backpack for him, I was entranced. The way she describes remembering where things were in the bag, feeling for them since she could see nothing, the moment-to-moment heart pounding suspense as she completes this simple act of finding dry socks for her son while risking being lost in the desert, caught by the authorities, sent back over the border to Mexico and ultimately murdered by the drug cartel, was astoundingly well played. I truly found myself clenched and tensed at the conclusion of episodes like this.

Meanwhile, learning that the man who befriends Lydia at her bookshop is also the same one that murdered her entire family in one swoop and pursues her and her son to finish the job, is a wholly unexpected twist. The story is like laminated pastry with layer after delicate layer of delicious food for thought.

The only place where I felt the author went off the rails, was when Lydia Facetimes Javier in the middle of the desert on like, one bar of cellular connectivity. It felt, to me, like the author thought she had to include that moment for us, so she pushed it in. As if readers would feel Lydia deserved to have the last word. It felt out of place, unrealistic and over the top for me. I forgave it because the rest of the book was so good.

And in the end, there’s a true-to-life conclusion, just the way I like it. Lydia and her son are living a life they did not imagine having only a short time before. Nothing can bring back their home or family and simply surviving must count as a win. This book made me stop thinking about immigrants as a group and start thinking about them as individuals, all with separate stories and motivations for escaping their own country and wanting to cross over into ours. I highly recommend this book. If you enjoy it even half as much as I did, it will be worth your time.