American Dirt

Can you really like a book and still not wait for it to be over? That’s the way I felt about American Dirt. It starts as a thriller – with a mother and her son on the run from a Mexican drug lord – but then morphs into something far more unsettling: what it is to be an illegal immigrant.

On their way north to the USA from Acapulco, Lydia and Luca learn how to board a moving train, are shown kindness and hospitality, are robbed at gunpoint, are threatened by gangs, see friends molested and navigate the blistering heat of the Sonoran Desert.

Every step of the journey is rendered in harsh, unflinching detail and there’s no letup in the tension. You keep reading, unsure of what will happen next, but with a pretty good idea that whatever does happen, it isn’t going to be anything pleasant. Usually, it isn’t.

This is why I wanted the book to be over. Because there’s no escape from the awful circumstances in which the two main characters – and the friends they make on their journey – find themselves. Unlike the reader, who can at least close the book and put it aside, Lydia and Luca can’t just stop when everything gets too much and check into a motel for a shower and a meal and nice soft bed. They have to go on. They have to endure everything thrown at them and keep going.  And while you're reading, you have to endure it too.

I finished American Dirt a week ago. I’m still thinking about it. It’s that good.