Review for American Dirt: Breathless Tears

This year more than past ones, I would say, I’ve really branched out of what I normally read (at least at leisure). I tried Romance and didn’t love it, tried Mystery novels and was surprised by how fun they are, and stayed the course with my usual change-your-world-perspective novels that continue to be my favourites. However, when I started Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, I did not expect its gravitas matched with the best elements of the works I’ve been reading lately: the adrenaline of a thriller, the heart of a poetry collection, and the small moments of softness in flashes of romance.

The story begins with the unsayable: no time for explanation, only reaction and a scramble to some sort of safety. Cummins writes an incredibly smart introduction to her novel that immediately solidifies a connection between reader, character, and author so that every heart involved pounds rapidly and loudly in each set of ears, on and off the page. The suspense of it all made me read one hundred pages in my first sitting, which is a lot for a slow reader like myself. Beyond this initial flash introduction to the center of terror, the story then follows Lydia and her son, Luca, as they find themselves on the run from an unthinkable situation. And when I say unthinkable, I really do mean it.

Throughout this novel, many themes are explored, but none so thoroughly and expertly as the experience of repeated trauma. Through her development of different characters, being mostly migrants like Lydia and Luca, Cummins skillfully illustrates different ways that trauma presents itself in a body: in the absence of speech and thought, or the over abundance of it. In the blankness, the twitches, the ways that anguish finds itself seeping through each character at some point in some way, as the body knows it must release bits of the ongoing damage before the brain does. However, amidst the ongoing adrenaline that comes with the story, there are some extraordinarily lovely moments strewn about, during instances where the reader finds themselves needing them too, in which the most beautiful, delicate, and kind scenes are illustrated with such vivid detail. Cummins has such a beautiful understanding of Mexican and Honduran topography which, amidst a year of stagnancy, transports the reader to scenes of magnificence that no resort could ever replicate.

This novel is also so much more than the adrenaline of running. Through this central motif, Cummins demonstrates the interconnectivity of marginalization. The fact that Lydia and her two companions, Soledad and Rebeca, are women – and young women at that – is something that is never lost on Cummins as she takes great care to bluntly and realistically remind her audience just how strongly gender and class impact a story like this one. She skillfully shows the absence of safety: how there isn't and never will be any safe space for women on the run. Matched with this, though, is a solidarity with Lydia, Soledad, Rebeca, and Luca that demonstrates one of the strongest narratives of a chosen family that I have seen even outside of the realm of fiction. It’s a bond that most of us will never understand but was nonetheless heart wrenching, heartwarming, and important to read.

At its core, this is a story about heart, strength, and kindness. It’s one of those novels that brings its reader outside of their body and aware of the story's alignment to reality. Each step Lydia and Luca take are real steps that folks take everyday towards a future that isn’t guaranteed, nor safe to assume in its permanence. It made me cry many times with both tears of joy and sadness throughout as Lydia, Luca, Soledad, and Rebeca became such real, well-rounded, broken characters. I cannot overstate how real everything is. So, not only would I recommend this novel, I would also say that it’s required reading.