Book Review: AMERICAN DIRT
Author: Jeanine Cummings
Publisher: Tinder Press
Supplier: Paiges Book Gallery
Reviewer: Albert Sword
Superb narrative takes reader out of comfort zone
Wanganui Midweek
2 mins to read
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American Dirt
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OMG! Do not buy this book if you are unwilling to be taken out of your comfort zone many, many times, and do not buy this book if you like romantic stories competently told with a jolly good time was had by all happy ending. No, indeed. But DO buy this wonderful book!
Jeanine Cummings is a lucky author. She has been personally touched by some of the happenings within her story and able to read daily newspapers to help construct her superb, almost documentary, narrative.
The chief protagonist of American Dirt is a woman, a strong, strong woman, who must of necessity save and protect herself and her young son from the gross indecencies of the Mexican cartels running her country and threatening their lives.
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She, with her young son, must escape one of these warring cartels and what follows is a road story that beats any other road story I have read.
Jeanine Cummings' narrative is gripping; spellbinding, and her characters are so well formed that I was immediately both drawn to and repulsed by her characterisations. Her writing is heartfelt and simple, her storytelling quite perfect.
As Jeanine says: "I wrote American Dirt because I wanted to access the human story behind the headlines about immigration."
This she has done, and in the simple way of a storyteller at the height of her powers, managed to tell the story without the usual political blame casting. Life is what it is.
Jeanine tells her story and creates her narrative not around politics, but around love. Inhumanity, surely, duplicity, yes, disappointment and hardship, true, but this book is about love.
I found when reading Jeanine's totally compulsive novel, even from the first sentence (one of THE best first sentences ever!), that I absolutely believed in each of the characters. I saw the bad in the good, as characters have to make life saving decisions, and the 'normality' in the bad.
Superb writing which conveys truth. This novel truly deserves its bestseller status.