Mediaboss Marketing

At the opening of Jeanine Cumminss devastating and timely novel, bookshop owner Lydia and her eight-year-old son, Luca, are the only survivors of a targeted massacre by the Mexican cartel that dominates and terrorises their home town of Acapulco. Sixteen of their relatives have been shot at a family barbecue, including Lydias husband and Lucas father, a journalist who had been investigating and reporting on the drug traffickers.

What follows is the story of a mothers desperate attempts to keep her son alive, away from the cartel whose influence stretches across Mexico and from whom she knows they will never be safe. It is through their ordeal that 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.

Lydia and Lucas journey towards the US border is perilous and terrifying. More than once, Lydia has to run alongside a high-speed train with Luca at her side, scrambling on board with their backpack as it hurtles along. Cummins does not hold back in describing the fate of those who do not time their jump successfully.

Along the way there is hunger, cold and the cruelty and occasionally kindness of strangers, while the gnawing terror of discovery by their murderous pursuers is ever present. During the journey, they meet and befriend other migrants, each with their own harrowing story about their need to escape. Two teenage sisters fleeing sexual exploitation are particularly affecting, the brutality of their experiences juxtaposed against their fiercely protective sibling bond.

It is this contrast familial love against external atrocities that gives the novel its immediacy and power. Small details as when Lydia risks losing the rest of their group in order to put a plaster on Lucas blister are quietly heartwrenching.

What Cummins does so skilfully in the novel is to subvert popular preconceptions about migrants. Lydia is educated, middle-class, escaping to America not in search of better economic opportunities but simply to survive. She and Luca are actual migrants All her life shes pitied those poor people. Shes donated money. Shes wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite, how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they came from, that this is the better option.

Cummins answers this question so compellingly that it is hard to imagine there will be a more urgent or politically relevant novel this year.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is published by Headline (14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over 15

Original post:
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins review panic and pathos on the run from the cartel - The Guardian