While I often found Sebastián’s emotional life on the callow side, I was never bored by his company ... Its portrait of Sebastián’s peer group in Mexico City, for one thing, is lively and complex. Another strength is the surprisingly moving depiction of Sebastián’s encounter as a journalist with a teenage refugee from Guatemala who has been through an ordeal that Medina Mora renders vividly.
Medina Mora’s lively intelligence and humor compensates for some of his narrator’s less agreeable tendencies ... América del Norte has a formidable goal: to define the contradictions of contemporary North America and its elites. But where those contradictions overcome the author’s own powers of observation, the book breaks down into its constituent parts: a literary CV in the American context, and the diary of a junior in the Mexican one.
A piercing critique of the shallowness of academia and the soufflélike weightlessness of American culture ... Assured, darkly funny, and impeccably written.
Incisive and witty ... The author casts a wry look at the absurdities of American writing programs and of Trump’s immigration policies, but what makes this special are his insights on the inner drive of aspiring artists and thinkers. It’s an arresting novel of ideas.
