STEPHEN KING WAS RIGHT
First of all, I read the main scathing reviews about American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins and agreed with their complaints, but they actually made me ultra curious as to what the book is all about since it rose from all that negative ash to become a bestselling novel, selling over 3 million copies internationally. So, I compartmentalized all that information, read many of the customer reviews and blogs, realized the opinions are intensely wide-ranging, and decided to go ahead and buy it.
Once I got past all this, I read and enjoyed the story since it maintained its immersive effect until the last page. It’s a fantastic read for anyone who has no connection with the migrant experience because it opens up your mind to seek novels with a more authentic approach; it could also lead you to memoirs written by immigrants; Cummins partly uses the Acknowledgments pages to recommend authors to read for more information about Mexico and the migrant experience. I even read many customers’ reviews, which said they didn’t know the migrant experience was that horrific; American Dirt made many feel empathetic, or at least sympathetic, hungry to find out more, leading them to brown authors they would have never found if they hadn’t read Ms. Cummins’ book. This left me wondering what would’ve happened if the publisher published the cover without barbwire and without blurbs claiming American Dirt was the modern-day Grapes of Wrath? Hopefully, they learned to let the readers compare Cummins’ novel to canonical works of literature themselves.
Since this novel has been reviewed ad nauseam, it feels like there’s nothing left to point out. So, this in-depth review will focus on the first seven pages since Stephen King’s blurb says, “I defy anyone to read the first seven pages of this book and not finish it.” This fascinated me since, once I compartmentalized all the things that were pointed out to be wrong in many reviews, I enjoyed the way the story starts since the inciting incident happens within the first seven pages, and this makes it a page-turner, especially for the target audience.
GUNSHOTS AND CONFUSION
The first line on page one throws you into the middle of what can be assumed is the inciting incident, but you don’t know for sure since it feels like you missed what inspired the opening scene’s violence; Cummins immerses you into the scene through the boy, Luca; “One of the very first bullets comes in through the open window above the toilet where Luca is standing. He doesn’t immediately understand that it’s a bullet at all, and it’s only luck that it doesn’t strike him between the eyes” (1). The opening makes it a page-turner right after the first line since you can’t help but feel for the little boy, who is going through this violence at his grandmother’s house during a quinceañera for his cousin, and then his mom rushes in and throws him and herself into the shower stall to hide from the madness that they can only hear. The narrator increases the tension, describing the shower stall as one with “no door… no curtain. It’s only a corner of his abuela’s bathroom, with a third tiled wall built to suggest a stall. This wall is around five and a half feet high and three feet long—just large enough, with some luck, to shield Luca and his mother from sight” (1). While this is happening, you still don’t know who’s causing the violence, leaving you to interpret it as something so dangerous they have to hide in a shower stall as the gunshots ring outside of the bathroom’s small window. The opening scene leaves the reader motivated to find out why this is happening.
THE EFFECT OF FAMILIAL COMMONALITY
With the confusion still fresh in the characters and the readers’ minds, the third person omniscient narrator uses Luca to show that children have a shared knowledge of cartel horrors happening in their community. Surviving the violence makes him feel exhilarated and makes him understand he’s not dreaming. The tension builds as his mother leaves him in their hiding spot to check out the aftermath of the violence they heard. Luca obeys because he doesn’t want to see what happened outside. “His whole family out there, in Abuela’s backyard. Today is… his cousin Yénifer’s quinceañera, her fifteenth birthday party. She’s wearing a long white dress. Her father and mother are there, Tío Alex and Tía Yemi, and Yénifer’s younger brother, Adrián, who, because he already turned nine, likes to say he’s a year older than Luca, even though they’re really only four months apart” (4). Then he starts to remember what his family was doing before he went to the bathroom and heard the barrage of gunshots, wails, ending with eerie silence. These memories also help to create emotional intrigue for the reader since it shows the commonality we all share regarding our families, increasing the page-turning effect for the book’s target audience. These effects don’t stop here either. They continue throughout the narrative.
MUST READ THE REST
On page seven, this is where the inciting incident’s effect fully sets in because the narrator shows how alone the mother and Luca are at this point. By making it about a mother and son who have had their entire family massacred, and about a mother reeling from realizing her son is traumatized beyond anything she could help with, the narrator creates a connection with the reader because anyone could sympathize with this horrific situation. This also increases the page-turning effect of the prose, as well. Page seven is also used to create the setting, showing the reader that this happened in a beautiful Mexican tourist city called Acapulco. However, the beauty is eclipsed by ominousness when the neighbors close their curtains so they can deny seeing anything that happened earlier; after the detective approaches, the mother realizes she needs her son to not hear her “forthright answers to these dreadful questions. She should send him to his father. Her mother. Her sister, Yemi. But they are all dead in the backyard, their bodies as close as toppled dominoes. It’s all meaningless anyway. The police aren’t here to help” (7). The ominousness created in the first seven pages is fully set at this point, and if your instinct tells you this is just the beginning of tension-filled events for this pair, you’re on the right track. As the story unfolds from here, the author expertly drops bits of backstory to keep you reading and feeling for the characters because you still don’t know what caused the massacre. You can’t avoid asking, what would inspire a cartel to kill an entire family in broad daylight?
BEFORE THE LAST STEP
Even with the heart pounding start, the first seven pages also reveal inauthenticity, and this could annoy readers who are well-versed in Mexican culture, potentially pulling them out of the story. However, people who have deep knowledge about Mexican culture and cartel behavior are not the target audience; therefore, the readers within the novel’s target audience are definitely the ones Stephen King is speaking to in his blurb. The story plays out like an American movie about a fictional Mexican cartel and hits all the points the target audience would expect from a story involving Mexican cartels. Personally, the inauthenticity that could’ve annoyed or distracted me just blended into the reading experience because I chose to compartmentalize them. As I became immersed, I started to care more about the story than nitpicking what wasn’t 100% authentic and enjoyed the read.
One of the best parts to me is the moment when Beto, a ten-year-old boy, enters the story. He comes in as if he deserves a hero’s entrance filled with cheers and revelry. It happens as the main characters are traveling atop La Bestia, except the characters are confused because they see a train filled with migrants going the other direction, “and one young boy, not much older than Luca, is standing atop the southbound train. He seems to be gauging whether or not he could jump the gap. A group of men yell and gesture wildly at him, so he clambers down the nearby ladder instead, and jumps down to the ground. Then he runs north alongside the northbound train. The train is traveling quite slowly now, and Luca leans over the edge in astonishment to watch the running boy beneath. He looks up at Luca and grins. He grips the moving ladder of Luca’s freight car and hauls himself up…On the idling southbound train, a loud cheer goes up for the boy’s victorious transfer, and the boy shouts back to the men, who all wave and smile” (263). This was also the start of Beto’s significant and entertaining addition to the plot.
Overall, it would’ve been more believable if Lydia was a child of an expatriate who went to live in Mexico during her late teens, then married a man with a similar background, so their naiveté about Mexico’s cartel culture would be believable to people with a Mexican or Mexican American background, especially for a first-generation like myself; when I asked my parent if it’s believable for Mexican nationals to not understand the status and behavior of a man who can command cartel thugs to leave their post, they said, “No, no one is that stupid over there.”
Considering how it had over 3 million sales and counting, the critical reviews by Gurba and Sehgal probably were the best things that happened to American Dirt since I think it just would’ve been a regular selling novel without their scathing reviews, so those reviews were definitely blessings in disguise and, as a result, Cummins should be wealthy or at least rich, and able to write only if she wants to. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is a novel written perfectly for its intended audience and a book written imperfectly for people outside of the intended audience, proving the old writing adage, “if you write for everyone, you write for no one,” is right all the way to the bank, which is also proven by the polarized reviews on every book blog and ecommerce site that has this book on there. Love it or hate it, this book reached levels of success it couldn’t have reached without the controversy creating interest that led to millions of sales, leading many people, who have no connection to the migrant experience, to read Cummins’ Acknowledgments, finding out about writers who wrote authentic fiction and non-fiction related to the migrant experience, resulting in more people having compassion for migrants than before.
Thank you for reading our in-depth book review about American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. We are not affiliated with the publisher, but here’s the link to pick up a copy.
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E. R. Sanchez is the author of Fried Potato Press’s first young adult thriller, Petaco Dreams, which will be released in 2025 after the rewrite, new title, and new cover. He also has poems and stories published online and in print. If you’d like to read his work that was published online, please click here to go to his Stories and Poetry Section.