PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksUnprecedented as certain aspects of the Trump administration policy was, families such as the one at the heart of Patricia Engel’s new novel, Infinite Country, have been routinely ripped apart by US immigration policies for the better part of a century. In her latest novel, Engel, whose fiction has won an array of literary prizes, revisits her own Colombian parents’ roots in an absorbing story of displacement, detention, and deportation that forcefully examines what unites a family beyond the divisions borders and policies forge ... The novel’s accounts of the precarity undocumented immigrants face are some of the most heart-rending pages in the novel ... While the entire novel is carefully constructed, near the end of Infinite Country several narrative decisions leave something to be desired ... Despite the ending’s narrative deficiencies, the bittersweet denouement — one that few families even reach — serves as a powerful reminder that these travails not only rarely have a \'happy ending,\' but that the cycles of generational trauma created by forced family separation are difficult, if not impossible, to overcome.
