I just came across this book review I drafted in early March of this year, which I was going to publish in a local NYC literary journal — and then the pandemic hit with a vengeance, and it didn’t seem that relevant anymore, so I put it aside. I also felt a little bad about piling on criticism against the author, who already suffered more than her fair share of criticism, some of which was deserved, but much of which was really less about her than it was about the U.S. book publishing industry, and its penchant for paying multi-million dollar advances to white authors while barely giving authors of color a platform for their work.
Then Trump told lie after lie about immigration in last week’s debate — including his assertion that the U.S. government is doing everything possible to reunite separated children with the parents from whom the government snatched them, which we know simply isn’t true. Since I wrote this review, the Trump administration has managed to use the COVID-19 pandemic to virtually shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, even to refugees suffering terrible harm while being forced to wait on the Mexican side of the border for months while awaiting a chance to plead their case before a U.S. immigration judge.
So when I stumbled upon a draft of this review when doing some household decluttering this weekend, I decided it was worth dusting it off and putting it out into the world.
The story of the journey Mexican and Central American asylum seekers have been making (and are still making, despite the dangers facing them at the border) in search of safety still needs to be told. This particular book is a flawed vehicle for telling this story, but it did raise the profile of the migrant’s journey among some Americans who might not have been inclined to learn about it otherwise.
Read my review and decide for yourself:
American Dirt: The Right Story Told the Wrong Way by the Wrong Author
