‘American Dirt’ an adrenalin-fueled page-turner

“American Dirt,” Jeanine Cummins, Flatiron Books (MacMillan), 383 pages, $23.99 paperback

What would you do if your entire family was gunned down at a birthday party, and only you and your eight-year-old son escaped?

This is in Acapulco and the shooters are members of a powerful cartel with a vendetta against your journalist husband for reporting on their brutalities. And you own a bookstore and only recently found out that the leader of the cartel was one of your favourite customers.

How will you get away?

That’s the opening chapter of “American Dirt,” a novel about Mexican migrants, published in January and chosen by Oprah for her Book Club. The author, Jeanine Cummins, received a seven-figure advance for it and it was blurbed glowingly by authors Stephen King, Ann Patchett, Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez. Don Winslow calls it “a ‘Grapes of Wrath’ for our time.” I couldn’t put it down.

Lydia Perez and her son, Luca, leave her now dead mother’s home where the police are barely investigating the shooting that took 16 of their relatives. (She suspects that the police are under the control of Javier, the cartel leader.)

Lydia and Luca spend the night in a hotel under a false name but in the morning a parcel arrives, a book of fiction from Javier with a love note. She and Luca manage to evade the black SUVs in the parking lot and board a series of buses to head for Mexico City.

What follows is a desperate and fearridden journey to “el Norte.” If they can escape across the U.S.-Mexico border, she has an uncle in Denver whom she hopes will take them in.

First she tries to fly to Tijuana but airlines require her son’s birth certificate. So, like scores of other Mexicans, they walk countless miles and learn to ride atop freight trains. They join migrants from other Latin American countries, including two sisters from Honduras. Rebeca and Soledad are teens who followed their father from their village to the city, only to become sex slaves for a gangland pimp.

Lydia has gone from a comfortable middle-class life to a living hell. While she was aware that her husband’s work put their family in some danger (his newspaper would put them up in a hotel for a few days after each cartel story was published), she was regrettably naïve as to the depths of evil that Javier, whom she saw as a sophisticated bibliophile, was carrying out. And the plight of migrants was outside her comfortable life in Acapulco. Now she too will have her money stolen and witness the murders and accidental deaths of several fellow travellers.

But the way north is, like the Underground Railway, not without its angels — they survive with the help of the kindness of strangers. “There is always a smile, a blessing, a flare of recognition from the hardworking young man, who … imagines his own little sister or cousin or daughter in the place of these girls.”

“American Dirt” is an adrenalin-fueled page-turner. This is the story of human beings escaping unbelievable violence in hopes of surviving in a country not controlled by brutal cartels.

But the book has been met with controversy, claiming that a white writer is too privileged to have empathy for her Latino and Mexican characters. The author spent four years researching the migrant experience and cites several migrant chronicles written by non-whites. She still felt unqualified to write this book but was advised by a Chicana academic: “We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story.”

For this reader, I am grateful that she did. In a better world, so would the President of the United States. We Canadians need to face our own racism and open our hearts to immigrants — all are human beings, like our own forbearers, in search of a better life.