It leans on stereotypes about Mexico and the treatment of the subject matter feels exploitative to a lot of people. Lydia finds Lorenzo's cell phone and discovers Lorenzo has been reporting her location to Javier. Writers are finding themselves arguing with friends and heroes. I started reading this book and since I have been living in Mexico for 15 years, could easily see the errors in the plot story. And yet, it’s unfortunate that the result is still a book that has some issues (see below). I think some of the criticisms are justified but I agree with you that they have gotten out of control- some people ARE downright hateful (read Myriam Gurba). Parul Segal wrote a review of it And I think recommending this book without making others aware of the problems with it is a little irresponsible.). A bigger issue that other reviewers have pointed out is Lydia’s “foreign gaze” when it comes to journeying through Mexico. The backstory for the characters and the writing are superior to your standard thriller. For a novel that sets out so earnestly to challenge the insular nationalism that leads the US‑Mexico border to feel like some kind of moral boundary, American Dirt may, despite or because of its manifest good intentions, accidentally reinforce the very kind of absolutist reasoning that keeps such myths alive. American Dirt is a work of fiction by Jeanine Cummins published in 2020 by MacMillan Press. I haven’t read this book, nor am I going to soon… But I’m seeing this going on for about a year now, how an author is also abused instead of only criticised. This road is like the crappiest Mexican road he’s ever seen. (But of course, how accurate any of these depictions are is questionable, so I take it all with a grain of salt.). Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2020 Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt, a novel about a Mexican bookseller who has to escape cartel-related violence with her son, fleeing to the US. That dream may be the meritocratic myth of classlessness (Philipp Meyer’s sharp 2009 debut, American Rust) or the pretence of a colour-blind justice system (Tayari Jones’s exceptional 2019 Women’s prize winner, An American Marriage). Thanks for reading! So what! Then Oprah Asked Me To Talk About It. Happy reading! Aside from any cultural stuff, it doesn’t take an expert to know that this story lacks realism in parts. Unfortunately, American Dirt is guilty of both these things. "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 … Yes Mexico is controlled by drug cartels, but there is beauty on those lands. And it's harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama. (Author Jeanine Cummins also had a manicure — mirror here in case that link goes down — that many found objectionable.). Lydia clears out her mother's bank account to pay him $11,000 for her and Luca. That said, I think that comes with it the burden of doing the work to portray other cultures or people accurately and responsibly. I don’t question Jeanine’s freedom of expression, I just wished this book was well researched. Your email address will not be published. I’m currently reading this book and as someone who is mexican, this book has created mixed feelings for me. I will instead rely on what other reviewers have said. But it proves hard to reconcile the novel’s humane intentions with its propulsive, action-movie execution (film rights have already been optioned by the company that produced the Clint Eastwood-directed crime drama The Mule). This gripping story of a mother and son on Mexico’s migrant trail combines humane intentions with propulsive, action-movie execution, Last modified on Fri 24 Jan 2020 12.39 GMT. If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ($1, $2, or $4) or joining the Patreon! Book club questions for American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins covers both the story and the controversy surrounding this novel. I can certainly see why a publisher choosing to promote a book on a sensitive topic of great importance and relevance without proper diligence would feel extremely exploitative to people who know that place and have lived that pain. Links 2 & 3 seem to take me to the same article? American Dirt Summary & Study Guide includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis, quotes, character descriptions, themes, and more. Book Review of American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins American Dirt begins by describing a shoot out at a barbeque where a woman's entire family, other than her son, are murdered by a cartel. So, what’s the deal, and should you read this novel? ISBN-13: 9781250209764 Summary Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. I think these are the pitfalls of a connected age. What exactly has happened to the understanding of creative liberties? I made myself a Goodreads shelf called American Dirt opposition and added the books you and Myriam Gurba mentioned to it. See the archives. Four widely shared articles that are critical of the book can be found here, here, here and here. What emerges is a kind of modern Odyssey with the United States as Ithaca, a gleaming refuge. Lydia Quixano Pérez owns a bookshop in downtown Acapulco, where she is teetering on the edge of an emotional affair with her favourite customer, the alluringly well-read Javier. Our protagonist Lydia is especially saintly, and yet also kind of stupid. Feel free to drop a comment below. Middle East has been, is still being, in certain respects, misrepresented. Everyone is either a murderer/rapist or a saint, and the characters rarely have to make hard decisions. I’m from India and knowing the reality about my country, if some author only considers one aspect for their book and sweeps aside all the other things, then I won’t of course treat it as a misrepresentation. Instead, they continue on foot to Huehuetoca and stay at a migrant shelter. – Stephen King. Thanks for reading! It would have not been strong enough to resist the water pressure at the depths he quoted. This is not to say the story isn’t suspenseful or interesting for people who enjoy thrillers, though. 3. American Dirt is at its best when it knowingly explores the insulations, obligations and tenuousness of privilege. I’ve never tried crossing the border, but my instinct is that acting brash, but cute is not a great strategy. Lorenzo tells Lydia that Javier's daughter Marta killed herself three days after learning the secret about her father. I wouldn’t rely on it to enhance your understanding of Mexico, and while it does contain some information about the difficulties migrants face, I would also take it all with a grain of salt. As mentioned above, in my opinion, writers must be able to write about people outside of themselves. But The Owl has eyes everywhere. Section-by-Section Summary of American Dirt. books I Spoke Out Against "American Dirt." It … 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. She was a typical hard working loving mother daughter aunt…that LIFE’s dark side threw curves! Of course, the sad fact is that literature, including stuff taught in schools, is rife with inaccuracies and inaccurate portrayals of places or people. This book also doesn’t do justice of explaining the beauty that Mexico has. American Dirt is the first book to ever score a perfect 5-stars in BookBrowse's early reader program, First Impressions--and we've reviewed more than 600 books to date! Jeanine Cummins’s immoderately hyped third novel, American Dirt, opens with blood-sodden terror as The Owl takes revenge: a machine-gun slaughter at a family barbecue. I really appreciate your suggestions of other, similar books to read as well as the links to four critics. This Study Guide consists of approximately 55 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of American Dirt. Soledad is pregnant by rape. In the epilogue on month later, Lydia and Luca move to Maryland to live with Soledad and Rebeca at their cousin Cesar's house. I was entertained by this book. In terms of the cultural inaccuracies, I’m not from Mexico or of Mexican heritage so I can’t really assess how accurate the depiction of Mexico is. Lydia’s husband, Sebastián, is an investigative journalist, working to unmask “The Owl”, the leader of an inventively gruesome new narcotics cartel whose grab for power has left the city ravaged and fearful. Parul Segal wrote a review of it that (accurately) lambastes some of the writing as being tortured or otherwise questionable, but honestly it’s still a large step up from your average thriller. The goal is to fly to a border city to cross, but at the airport, Lydia has no documentation for Luca. Book Review: ‘American Dirt’ by Jeanine Cummins April 19, 2020 6:00 AM In popular criticism of the novel, Cummins, and the publishing industry, this failure has led to … It is a “light hearted” look at a horrific topic that too many sheltered people choose to ignore thus I APPLAUD this protected eye opening novel. American Dirt Jeanine Cummins, 2020 Flatiron Books 400 pp. But stuff like this really does reinforce the idea that this is just a big publishing house capitalizing on and exploiting the pain of immigrants without any genuine concern for their plight. It dusts American Dirt with a sheen of sensationalist unreality that obscures rather than illuminates the quotidian terrors that beat at the heart of this book. 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. Follow along on Goodreads, or keep in touch via the newsletter. When I saw it was a thriller I realized why the author, not understanding Mexico would distort life here. "It’s a heart-wrenching page-turner, and you won’t be able to put it down." Furthermore, for sensitive topics, I think that burden is especially high. She’s donated money. Javier is the leader of Los Jardineros and had also been a close personal friend of Lydia's. It’s just “skin,” okay? Together, they all go to Nogales to meet the girls' coyote, El Chacal. I do think she did a good job of working these things into the narrative. Note: This is a summary of Jeanine Cummins's NYT's bestseller, American Dirt. Others, like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, on further inspection, misrepresent the societies they are depicting and contradict historical records. Unless there’s something noteworthy about the color, you can just refer to it as “skin.”. Is it of a lesser value today? Who could argue with a persecuted mother and child fleeing the grisly hellscape Cummins describes (beheadings, babies hanged from trees, forced self-cannibalisation) for the sanctuary of the US, where the only danger to migrants is the threat of deportation? “Are they just drive-by Samaritans?” a local church member asks. American Dirt is being compared to The Grapes of Wrath, and the comparison is apt.” ―San Francisco Chronicle “Pulse-pounding.” ―Chicago Tribune "As literature, American Dirt is modern realism at its finest: a tale of moral. 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. And the book has been tagged as a fiction, domestic fiction, thriller. As Mexican nationals, Lydia and Luca are free to go (with payment), but Luca demands that they save Soledad and Rebeca. If I hadn’t known about the criticisms, it would not have seemed overtly apparent to me that the book was problematic (with some exceptions, see below). The novel is a fast-frothing thriller about Lydia, a bourgeois Mexican bookseller, and her son Luca, who flee to … Why doesn’t she (a middle-class woman) know that you need documentation to ride a plane? Cummins received a seven-figure advance for this book. I will pass on American Dirt for that reason alone. Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. Review: Compelling ‘American Dirt’ humanizes a migration tale with care Jan. 16, 2020 Lydia and her son suffer hunger, threats of physical … Why would she think it wasn’t necessary to have any safety precautions with her husband publishing an expose on a cartel boss? Does it make his book less enjoyable? In American Dirt, after her journalist husband runs afoul of cartel boss Javier Fuentes, Lydia’s entire family is murdered with the exception of her young son, Luca. One man party breaks his leg and his godfather stays with him so they can go turn themselves into border patrol (as opposed to dying in the desert). American Dirt is a book that tells a well-paced story that is timely and accessible. However, I believe this book has become a catalyst for creating the conversation of what is an immigrant, and leading readers to other Latinx stories that are far better than American Dirt. ydia Quixano Pérez owns a bookshop in downtown Acapulco, where she is teetering on the edge of an emotional affair with her favourite customer, the alluringly well-read Javier. We watch Lydia’s entire family get killed, one by one. “I am acutely aware,” she explains in her afterword, “that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass, but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique.” American Dirt is her attempt to “honour the hundreds of thousands of stories we never get to hear” by inhabiting one. One thing I’ll say in Cummin’s defense is that I doubt she imagined when she submitted the book that it would end up being this large of a release. A distant cousin in Colorado offers the only hope of escape from the cartel’s reach, so Lydia and Luca head for el norte with a threadbare plan to reach the border by freight train (the infamous La Bestia), and then bribe a people smuggler to help them cross the desert to US soil. The reviewer clarifies that a “lechuza” is more specifically a screech owl that has been considered an omen and harbinger of death in Mexican culture for thousands of years, which any Mexican would know (according to that person). 1. Furthermore, Cummins throws in a wide range of stereotypically Mexican/Mexican-ish things. Good book club reads are thought-provoking and lend itself to in-depth discussions. I also think reviewers should be more honest about what they don’t know. When reporters shove a microphone in someone’s face after they’ve experienced trauma, it’s exploitative. There wasn’t a ton that stuck out to me when I first started reading, beyond a standard level of nit-picks. This gripping story of a mother and son on Mexico’s migrant trail … American Dirt debuted on New York Times best sellers list as the #1 on the list for the week of February 9, 2020. Action-packed and suspenseful, American Dirt is a thriller that tells a story about migration into the United States. and yes, I totally agree this was one of the harder reviews to write given that so many people have strong feelings about it and there’s a lot of external stuff going on around it. People need to be allowed to write about cultures they are not a part of, or review books from heritages that are not their own. Obviously, a book can be two things at once. (Furthermore, there are clearly systemic issues that allowed those problems to be ignored on its way to publication. For example, an issue that’s been brought up is the stereotypes about Mexico that many feel are pervasive throughout the book. They continue riding La Bestia and meet a asthmatic, migrant 10-year-old boy, Beto. When she has thousands of pesos on hand and hundreds of thousands in the attack, and more Dirt (! People try to extricate themselves, the third novel by Jeanine Cummins –! 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