Author: Jeanine Cummins

I loved this book and couldn’t read it fast enough. All the way through I struggled not to go to the end and see how it turned out.

Lydia and her son, Luca, fear for their lives after their entire family are murdered by the leader of a Mexican cartel. Lydia feels the only safe place for them is in the United States. This is an horrendous journey and every decision she makes has life and death consequences.

Quote from the book:

“As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exist among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.”

Quote from the author:

“One thing I had to learn while doing research for this book was to strangle the word American out of my own vocabulary. Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere there’s some exasperation that the United States has co-opted that word, when in fact the American continents contain multitudes of cultures and peoples who consider themselves American, without the hijacked cultural connotations. In my conversations with Mexican people, I seldom heard the word American used to describe a citizen of this country — instead they use a word we don’t even have in English: estadounidense, United States-ian.

What this woman and her son endured is probably very common among immigrants. And I’m going to try to stop using the word American for people from south of the border.

Goodreads Rating: * * * * *