... a literary novel, to be sure, with nuanced character development and arresting language; yet, its narrative hurtles forward with the intensity of a suspense tale ... American Dirt's most profound achievement, though, is something I never could've been told about nor anticipated. Of all the 'What if?' novels I've read in recent years—many of them dystopian—American Dirt is the novel that, for me, nails what it's like to live in this age of anxiety, where it feels like anything can happen, at any moment ... Cummins' novel brings to life the ordeal of individual migrants, who risk everything to try to cross into the U.S. But, in its largest ambitions, the novel also captures what it's like to have the familiar order of things fall away and the rapidity with which we humans, for better or worse, acclimatize ourselves to the abnormal. Propulsive and affecting, American Dirt compels readers to recognize that we're all but a step or two away from 'join[ing] the procession.'
... thrilling and devastating ... In its representation of the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, American Dirt is as powerful as last year’s Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli, though the two novels have fashioned their storytelling from very different cloth ... Cummins’s straightforward account relies on intimate, relatable realism ... offers both a vital chronicle of contemporary Latin American migrant experience and a profoundly moving reading experience. If only we could press it into the hands of people in power. If only a story this generously told would inspire them to expand the borders of their vision of America.
The motives of the book may be unimpeachable, but novels must be judged on execution, not intention. This peculiar book flounders and fails ... everything follows as predictably as possible ... There is a fair amount of action in the book—chases, disguises, one thuddingly obvious betrayal—but if you’re at all sensitive to language, your eye and ear will snag on the sentences. There are so many instances and varieties of awkward syntax I developed a taxonomy ... the writing grows so lumpy and strange it sounds like nonsense poetry. I found myself flinching as I read, not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English language receives ... Cummins has put in the research, as she describes in her afterword, and the scenes on La Bestia are vividly conjured. Still, the book feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider. The writer has a strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradients of brown skin ... The real failures of the book, however, have little to do with the writer’s identity and everything to do with her abilities as a novelist ... What thin creations these characters are—and how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations. The heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous. The children sound like tiny prophets ... The tortured sentences aside, American Dirt is enviably easy to read. It is determinedly apolitical. The deep roots of these forced migrations are never interrogated; the American reader can read without fear of uncomfortable self-reproach. It asks only for us to accept that 'these people are people,' while giving us the saintly to root for and the barbarous to deplore—and then congratulating us for caring.
... inspires empathetic despair in a hypothetical American reader. Along with the rapturous praise that first accompanied it, the book encourages comfort with this facsimile of justice alone ... Are the tens of thousands of migrant children held in government custody, some of whom never see their families again, to feel comforted by American Dirt’s limp exhortation to the average reader—or by Oprah Winfrey’s selection of the novel for her famed Book Club? For those whose lives are not shaped fundamentally by the indifference of others, empathy can be a seductive, self-aggrandizing goal. It demands little of author and reader alike ... is at its strongest when it emphasizes Lydia’s protectiveness over her son. These moments do not, however, exist in a vacuum. For each moment of maternal connection that Cummins and readers living comfortably in the U.S. might relate to, American Dirt includes a depiction of sensationalized violence—bullets that tear, machetes that slice. Again and again, Lydia and Luca’s pain—and the pain of people like them—is offered up for dissection and consumption in place of meaningful character development. It’s these moments of torment that are Cummins’s clearest appeals to the otherwise unaware or uncaring reader; it’s these scenes that reveal just how tangential readers with their own traumatic experiences of migration are to the American Dirt project ... Does the same reader capable of reading numerous news stories about family separation soften when a story is presented through the lens of Cummins’s fiction—and if so, whom does that internal change really benefit? ... It is as though American Dirt seeks to justify its own didactic existence.
...the book’s very ambitions, to document the migrant experience, ultimately work against it ... the novel is compelling and eye-opening. Short sentences, driving narrative ... For all her desire to flesh out her subjects’ stories, Cummins cannot give her characters depth. They remain resolutely two-dimensional ... All this means that when Cummins does, belatedly and in a rush, return to the thriller premise to tie up loose ends, the air has long since gone out of the novel, leaving the reader informed, yes, but also deflated.
... a fast-paced, narrative-focused journey into the often terrifying world of the North, Central and South American refugee trail ... Cummins moves the story along skillfully, with sprinkled-in suspense in the form of backstory and action-heavy sequences. Much of the book is made up of relatively short, present-tense sentences, and there’s little in the way of digression. Like its two central characters, the story is in constant motion. But for all the suspense, what holds the novel together is the relationship between Lydia and Luca. Both characters are forced to delay their grieving process in order to survive, and so they are bound not only by blood but also by shared trauma ... an important book for the current political moment, providing readers with a better understanding of the motives behind such journeys at a time when migrants are readily and easily vilified. It’s an absolute page turner with wider relevance.
400 pages of heart-pounding, page-turning, can’t-put-it-down, stay-up-till-3 a.m., adrenaline-pumping story ... What is great about how hard this novel is to put down is the hope that it will not be put down. Because it also examines, with sensitivity, care, and complexity of thought, immense, soul-obliterating trauma and its aftermath. It is also about teeth-gritting, unromantic perseverance ... Lydia’s willingness to kill or die for her son, and Soledad’s for her sister, serves to make them 21st century heroines. It also encourages us to ask ourselves: How could we, under the current regime of terror on both sides of the border, do more to help those who are running for their lives? ... “American Dirt” is a vital, well-crafted, compelling and compassionately told story. With a little luck, it might motivate some critical mass of women to rise up and take back the world.
A few pages into reading American Dirt, I found myself so terrified that I had to pace my house ... the narrative is so swift, I don’t think I could have stopped reading ... Their painful and thirsty hours in the desert haunt me still ... contains few of the aspects that I have long believed are necessary for successful literary fiction; yet if it did have them, this novel wouldn’t be nearly as propulsive as it is. The book’s simple language immerses the reader immediately and breathlessly in the terror and difficulty of Lydia and Luca’s flight. The uncomplicated moral universe allows us to read it as a thriller with real-life stakes. The novel’s polemical architecture gives a single very forceful and efficient drive to the narrative. And the greatest animating spirit of the novel is the love between Lydia and Luca: It shines its blazing light on all the desperate migrants and feels true and lived ... Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism; at the same time, weeks after finishing it, the novel remains alive in me. When I think of the migrants at the border, suffering and desperate, I think of Lydia and Luca, and feel something close to bodily pain. American Dirt was written with good intentions, and like all deeply felt books, it calls its imagined ghosts into the reader’s real flesh.
With the topic of immigration dominating the news, we are bombarded with statistics but have little sense of the human beings involved ... Though flawed, this book adds to that discussion ... Whether or not readers personally identify with the storyline about a frantic escape to another country, almost everyone will find glimpses of shared experiences, of the times when everyday life changed in a flash as the result of events beyond one’s control ... Does the plot over-simplify some of the people and many of the situations, as critics argue? Yes ... But those arguments do not negate the merits of this book. Rather, they highlight the need for more books on the issue, ones written by Mexican and Central American writers.
... [a] mesmeric and unsettling tour de force ... a novel at once deeply personal and intensely political ... The solidarity between these four traumatized victims stands as a testament to human capacity for connection ... modern realism at its finest: a tale of moral challenge in the spirit Theodore Dreiser wrapped inside a big-hearted social epic like The Grapes of Wrath. Cummins, whose author’s note reveals that her husband was once an undocumented immigrant, has clearly done extensive research to capture the wide swath of Mexican experience that she explores with subtlety and persuasive authenticity ... is also an indictment. And as with many of the strongest of literary indictments, its power comes from its specificity...he ghastly suffering of Lydia and Soledad—while technically fictional—proves fore more agonizing than any expansive general commentary on the abuse of migrants could ever be ... the novel truly earns its bloodshed, implicitly making the case that such violent epic is needed at present ... going to be the defining book of 2020, the volume that bring the atrocities of our failed immigration policy into the book clubs and bookshops and kitchens of American men and women just like Lydia. Cumming and her writing will most certainly be nominated for major awards and may even win. These prizes will certainly be deserved. But for Lydia’s sake, and Luca’s, and Soledad’s, and the many thousands suffering like them, what matters most about the book is that readers remember why it had to be written. And that, for now, nothing has changed.
My God, does this book shake the statistics out of you. It starts with a gunshot and does not let up. It places you right in the heart of the terror and holds your eyes open. Released at the end of January, this might be the first book some people read this year. It might also be the best ... Cummins doubted her credentials to write this book. Many will be glad she forged ahead. The clear research and heart that went into these pages leave the reader in little doubt about its storyteller ... Each scene of the book is so detailed and immediate, every threat so unbearable, that the fiction barely feels like fiction at all ... The plot is tightly woven: the narrative tumbling along and the backstory creeping up behind like a terrifying stalker. But it is the strong and memorable characters that are the book’s forte. I loved Lydia, her kindness, her resilience, her mothering nature. I loved Luca’s smarts (he’s a geography ace with “perfect direction the way some prodigies have perfect pitch”) and his bravery. I was moved by the morality of Sebastian, Lydia’s husband, a journalist who dies practising freedom of the press. These are good people. They subvert what some think they know about migrants, and speak to our humanity.
Cummins’ efficient prose delivers thrills, horror and tender moments, but it’s the action scenes that stand out ... Some of the faintest praise that could be bestowed on a novel is to call it 'topical,' but while this book reflects the current real-world crisis at many of the world’s borders, the story is masterfully composed of timeless elements ... although Cummins, who married an undocumented immigrant, has written an eminently readable adventure, she doesn’t mine the pain of migrants for entertainment. Rather, she proves that fiction can be a vehicle for expanding our empathy.
All the elements are in place for a slick cartel thriller: a relentless villain; an improbable attraction; a clock-ticking chase to safety; a conveniently precocious child ... But despite its flamboyant and breathless first act, that’s not the novel American Dirt aspires to be ... there is a particular kind of literary ambition rooted in titularly American tales – a desire to puncture the soft complacency of American dreams ... Cummins’s title is no accident ... But it proves hard to reconcile the novel’s humane intentions with its propulsive, action-movie execution ... It’s an activist’s gambit: create a trauma so immense that we cannot help but be swept along by the force of its pathos. 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 ... What emerges is a kind of modern Odyssey with the United States as Ithaca, a gleaming refuge. 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.
... devastating and timely ... Cummins humanises the migrant crisis, delivering a powerful portrayal of the extraordinary lengths people will go to in order to save their loved ones. It is a moving portrait of maternal love and an unflinching description of the experiences of wretched, displaced people on the move ... It is this contrast – familial love against external atrocities – that gives the novel its immediacy and power ... What Cummins does so skilfully in the novel is to subvert popular preconceptions about migrants ... it is hard to imagine there will be a more urgent or politically relevant novel this year.
... a gripping scenario. Then things get real problematic real fast ... positions itself as the great sociopolitical novel of our era. Instead, it reeks of opportunism, substituting character arcs for mere trauma. Bones are broken. Bodies are ripped apart beneath trains. Women are raped, and raped again. Multiple children die graphically, one crushed beneath a garbage truck ... Cummins has crafted an outsider with whom any reader can take the journey with a sympathetic heart, a middle-class working mother who crosses the border illegally only because she’s forced to by an all-powerful villain. It’s a cunning calculation, and also a deeply cynical one. Along the way, she encounters innumerable characters who exist solely to explain various aspects of the process (coyotes, border patrol, ICE agents) in stilted exposition, and every brown person reads as a potential threat ... Characters make terrible decisions that defy logic to advance the plot along a thriller’s prescribed path ... Even on a sentence level, American Dirt is frequently cringeworthy ... These character, story and style missteps would be problematic no matter the source. But it matters in this case that the source is a European-born woman in the U.S. without ties to the Mexican migrant experience.
...a novel whose premise could have been stripped from a CNN news crawl ... flawed but deeply compelling ... Dirt will likely be considered the more accessible of the two and arrives, accordingly, with the bigger megaphone ... Cummins’ cleanly drawn tale of a woman and her young son fleeing cartel violence in the once-idyllic resort town of Acapulco speaks in the universal language of mothers and children, grief and perseverance (though her actual prose dips, early and often, into vivid fragments of Spanish) ... That Cummins (A Rip in Heaven) has approached her subject with extensive research and clear empathy can’t quite mitigate the discomfort that, as a white woman so far removed from the migrant crisis, this story isn’t strictly hers to tell.
Screen reader support enabled.
...a novel whose premise could have been stripped from a CNN news crawl ... flawed but deeply compelling ... Dirt will likely be considered the more accessible of the two and arrives, accordingly, with the bigger megaphone ... Cummins’ cleanly drawn tale of a woman and her young son fleeing cartel violence in the once-idyllic resort town of Acapulco speaks in the universal language of mothers and children, grief and perseverance (though her actual prose dips, early and often, into vivid fragments of Spanish) ... That Cummins (A Rip in Heaven) has approached her subject with extensive research and clear empathy can’t quite mitigate the discomfort that, as a white woman so far removed from the migrant crisis, this story isn’t strictly hers to tell.
Cummins has, essentially, written two novels in one — and both are one-dimensional — which makes for an uneven, if propulsive, read. American Dirt is a thriller and a page-turner; Lydia and Luca must outwit and outrun the cartel as they undertake a dangerous and seemingly impossible journey to a precarious new life in the US ... It is also an attempt to portray both the parlous situation for journalists in Mexico and the desperate reasons why so many people from Central America risk their lives by crossing Mexico to enter the US as undocumented migrants ... American Dirt, with its portentous title, cannot be classed as a political book, for all its timeliness and humanity. Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel Lost Children Archive, about what happens once migrants reach the Mexican-American border, is a profoundly more nuanced and urgent work ... Yet Cummins, in addition to an undeniable flair for drama, conveys well the shifting allegiances of characters who find themselves in changed circumstances, and is good on the sensorial aspect of the gruelling odyssey: hunger, boredom, fear, exertion and depletion, overlaid with the often fiercely beautiful sights and smells of Mexico. Notwithstanding the book’s flaws, Cummins ensures that we root for [these] lives right up till the end.
... propulsive ... Cummins is a skilled and empathic chronicler of trauma and its aftermath ... Cummins is so attuned to the emotions of the traumatized that she evokes these feelings in the reader ... Cummins creates a convincing array of characters ... an unsettling and immersive story, fueled by the elemental love of a mother for her son that causes her to flee everything she’s known in her desperate quest for survival.
Cummins’ decision to center the story on Lydia is a good decision, and I wish the book had remained a narrative about a woman who is willing to do the impossible to save her son ... But the book ventures into the larger political minefield of immigration, particularly the sensitive territory of Central American migration. By employing the third-person omniscient point of view, Cummins not only shows insights from the unique perspective of Lydia, who is the outsider, but also from the perspectives of characters like Rebeca and Soledad, who are the insiders. The Honduran women’s tragic back stories sound a bit too familiar, and their characterizations are inscribed within an outsider’s wishful but two-dimensional view of women in this situation: They’re illustrious examples of resilience and perseverance; they are defined by their victimhood. That at one point they call themselves 'Indian' and not 'indigenous' also shows a lack of insider knowledge (or research) on the part of the author ... Cummins tells a highly original story, and I enjoyed following Lydia’s adventure. But the characters’ moralizing and other moments of pandering to social justice language toward the end of the book get in the way of the narrative, which, stripped of the other points of view, could have shined more compellingly. That’s unfortunate because Lydia’s journey is ultimately a story of personal growth.
Unfortunately, Jeanine Cummins['s] narco-novel, American Dirt, is a literary licuado that tastes like its title. Cummins plops overly-ripe Mexican stereotypes, among them the Latin lover, the suffering mother, and the stoic manchild, into her wannabe realist prose. Toxic heteroromanticism gives the sludge an arc and because the white gaze taints her prose, Cummins positions the United States of America as a magnetic sanctuary, a beacon toward which the story’s chronology chugs ... As a protagonist, Lydia is incoherent, laughable in her contradictions ... That Lydia is so shocked by her own country’s day-to-day realities, realities that I’m intimate with as a Chicana living en el norte, gives the impression that Lydia might not be…a credible Mexican. In fact, she perceives her own country through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist ... If Cummins had really wanted to draw attention to the assorted crises faced by Mexicans, Mexican migrants in particular, she could’ve referred readers to the primary and secondary sources she plundered ... Dirt is a Frankenstein of a book, a clumsy and distorted spectacle and while some white critics have compared Cummins to Steinbeck, I think a more apt comparison is to Vanilla Ice.
... typical of Cummins’s tendency to increase the emotional pressure at the expense of meaning ... The characters are vessels for Cummins’s incoherent ideas about trauma and her superficial research on Mexico ... Cummins doesn’t so much mix metaphors as pile them on top of one another: the more there are, the less it matters if they make sense ... superficially construed as a damsel-on-the-run thriller in the mode of Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train but with topical relevance ... the ‘character development’ is crude; the suspense nothing more than the heaping on of unfortunate events ... The trouble with Cummins’s writing isn’t that she gets Spanish wrong, which she does (she also misuses it – why call a soccer ball a balon de futbal in a book that converts pesos to dollars?), or that she borrows bits from other writers, such as Luis Alberto Urrea, and deploys their material clumsily; it’s that her simplistic worldview, split between the cutesy and the cruel, can’t handle subject matter of any seriousness, whatever the colour of her characters’ skin ... But it’s a worldview that sells.
In her beautiful, suspenseful and timely new novel...Jeanine Cummins succeeds in taking migration — one of the central issues of our time — and bringing it down to human size ... Cummins has drawn some criticism for taking on this subject without being Mexican herself. But she clearly has done her research, and her characters struck this reader as relatable and human, not stereotypes ... This important novel gives us a shake and makes us want to pay more attention.
...she spins an exciting yarn. Her story describes an engaging and riveting journey filled with chills, thrills and kills ... Anyone who has spent significant time in Mexico, however, will find this novel to be laughably inaccurate. It represents nothing more than the fanciful imaginings of its monolingual American author, no more authentic than my poor attempts at affecting a West Country drawl or a Cockney dialect ... The book is riddled with gross misrepresentations of its subjects ... Cummins sprinkles in the most stereotypical cultural fetishes that Americans associate with Mexico ... Cummins fails to understand the racial dynamics of Mexico, and of human genetics in general ... It is worth dwelling on the character of Javier for a moment. A 'drinking game' could be created based on all the Latin American stereotypes he personifies ... The cultural inaccuracies of American Dirt run deep, right down to the language. Throughout her book, Cummins shows confusion regarding the grammatical genders in Spanish ... Despite its entertainment value, American Dirt is an extremely inaccurate representation of the real situation of a real country.
American Dirt is more page-turner than literary masterpiece, a scorching, modern-day version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Instead of taking place in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic landscape, the nightmare is happening right here, right now, and Cummins tells the story with propulsive energy ... yes, she has clumsily tried to make a statement in the ongoing discussion about immigration. That the statement fell flat doesn’t negate its potential to influence readers who haven’t given much thought to the border or what happens there ... The action is almost unbearably suspenseful, and Cummins never delves into politics ... But mitigating such hopelessness is Cummins’ awareness of compassion, which may be the most compelling detail in the book ... That vein of kindness runs through American Dirt and reminds us we can do better, too.
American Dirt opens with a scene that is as shocking as it is gripping ... Cummins delivers a page-turning thriller where there is literally danger around every corner for her main characters ... The tension is always high ... this is a thoroughly researched and in the end compassionate look at what has become a highly politicised subject ... American Dirt effectively uses thriller tropes and some melodramatic story beats to force readers to focus on the human dimension of this global movement ... while American Dirt may not be the literary fiction breakout that some are touting, it is an important work. Never less than tense, and completely compulsive, Cummins manages to both make her point and deliver an effective piece of fiction.
It is a gory and candid account of the escape bid made by thousands of Mexican and South American migrants, related in the 'bleak, bleak journey' style of Cormac McCarthy or John Williams ... The novel largely takes place on top of the trains. Riding them is cartoonishly dangerous ... Cummins’s intention is ambitious and she pulls it off, expressing the incoherence of the devastated mind that cannot afford the luxury of grieving ... charges of appropriation, plagiarism and inauthenticity...are valid, even if the frenzy isn’t. This is a book about the border that doesn’t touch on the man trying to build a wall there. There is abundant suffering, and little blame. The norteño President is the elephant in the room. The one, brief, unlikely nod to him comes near the end, from a Mexican migration commandant—avuncular, murderous—who parrots the claim that migrants are thieves, rapists and murderers. Frustratingly, irresponsibly, in this account a lot of them are.
Guided by her imagination and voluminous research, Cummins' steely prose delivers humanizing depictions of the major players involved: the members of Mexico's shrinking bourgeois, the campesinos, the coyote, the low-level narco, la migra, the gawking gringos, borderland vigilantes, and even the drug lord at the root of the problem ... While media outlets and politicians caricaturize or overlook members of these groups, Cummins uncovers complexities in her characters and fathoms the unfathomable devastation they endure while questing for a better life on American soil ... Even when lyrical, Cummins sentences are quick, effective, and pregnant with meaning ... Critics target the obvious: Cummins' ethnicity ... Though her perspective is sweeping, it's worth noting that Cummins is just one novelist. She can't be expected to capture each heart-rendering story in a continental migration. The teeth-gnashing that has come out against American Dirt has an important truth behind it that should be heeded by publishers and readers. A panoply of writers is needed to capture the many facets of this current event of Central American migration—a dark diamond that can reflect the best and worst of humanity.
In a book both timely and prodigiously readable, Cummins offers an unrelenting and terrifyingly you-are-there account of a Mexican mother and son fleeing to America after cartel violence takes their entire family ... Cummins expertly balances the brutality of the cartel, its scary omniscience, and Lydia’s ululating fear with Lydia’s passionate commitment to Luca’s survival and the numerous small, brave acts of kindness she encounters that speed this duo north ... Here, it’s the journey rather than the arrival on American dirt that counts, and readers will wonder whether they could ever have survived such a trek even as they realize that this could happen to them. An important book.
While Cummins alternates points of view, Luca’s voice in particular sings with innocent optimism in the face of a series of near misses. The journey towards the prospect of safety is not only that of Luca and Lydia but of many other migrants, and complex secondary characters serve as both warnings and signs of possibility. Beautiful, straightforward language drives home the point that migration to safer places is not a political issue but a human one ... may be the don’t-miss book of 2020.
... terrifying and tender ... Cummins does a splendid job of capturing Lydia’s and Luca’s numb shock and then panic in the aftermath of the shootings, then their indomitable will to survive and reach el norte ... She vividly recounts their harrowing travels for more than 1,000 miles by bus, atop a lethally dangerous freight train, and finally on foot across the implacable Sonoran Desert. Peril and brutality follow them, but they also encounter unexpected generosity and heroism. Lydia and Luca are utterly believable characters, and their breathtaking journey moves with the velocity and power of one of those freight trains ... Intensely suspenseful and deeply humane, this novel makes migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border indelibly individual.
With this devastating yet hopeful work, Cummins breathes life into the statistics of the thousands fleeing their homelands and seeking to cross the southern border of the United States ... As the quartet travel, they face terror on a constant basis, with danger possible from any encounter, but also compassion and occasionally even wonder. This extraordinary novel about unbreakable determination will move the reader to the core.
