Sebastián lived a childhood of privilege in Mexico City. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowa's MFA program. But Sebastián's life is shaken by the Trump administration's restrictions on immigrants, his mother's terminal cancer, the cracks in his relationship with his American girlfriend, and his father's forced resignation at the hands of Mexico's new president.
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.
