American Dirt: A Novel
by Jeanine Cummins, 2020, Audiobook narraated by Yareli Arizmendi, Macmillan Audio
This book is a tough one to review because it’s not a bad book, but it’s not really a good book either. The book was a selection for Oprah’s book club and received a great deal of publicity and acclaim. Then it came under attack with scathing criticism because it was written by a white American author rather than someone who was supposedly Latina. I personally don’t feel that a book should be judged based on the ethnicity of its author but rather on the work itself.
My disappointment with the book is because I felt the story wasn’t about the what I was expecting. I was expecting a novel about some individuals migrating to the U.S. and requesting asylum. The story turns out to be about a mother and child attempting to escape the grip of the crime cartels in Mexico after they killed her journalist husband and the other members of her family. Lydia, the mother, had access to a considerable amount of money which helped her pay for her illegal passage into the U.S. She and her son made it across with some difficulty, but did not experience any of the trauma associated with the refugee and asylum process (camps, separation from children, etc).
The story itself was okay but didn’t seem to grab me much. The ending was abrupt and didn’t give a lot of satisfaction as to how it resolved.
So, while I reject the criticism that the book would only have been authentic if it had been written by a Latina author, I didn’t think reading (listening to) this book offered me much to get excited about.
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