Please join us to discuss #1 New York Times Best-Seller and Oprah's Book Club Pick American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins which tells the story of Lydia and Luca, a mother and son, forced to flee their Mexican home and escape to the United States as undocumented immigrants.
Wikipidia writes, "Lydia Quixano Pérez lives a comfortable life in Acapulco, Mexico, with her journalist husband, Sebastián, and her eight-year-old son, Luca. Lydia runs a bookstore and one day befriends a charming customer, Javier, who appears to have similar interests in books. However, Javier is revealed to be the kingpin of a drug cartel.
Sebastián publishes a profile exposing Javier's crimes, who then orders the slaughter of Sebastián and his family. Lydia and Luca escape the massacre, but are forced to flee Mexico, becoming two of the countless undocumented immigrants from Latin America who undertake the dangerous journey to the United States, taking a treacherous trip on La Bestia north of Mexico City."
"The book's simple language immerses the reader immediately and breathlessly in the terror and difficulty of Lydia and Luca's flight. The uncomplicated moral universe allows us to read it as a thriller with real-life stakes. The novel's polemical architecture gives a single very forceful and efficient drive to the narrative. And the greatest animating spirit of the novel is the love between Lydia and Luca: It shines its blazing light on all the desperate migrants and feels true and lived…American Dirt was written with good intentions, and like all deeply felt books, it calls its imagined ghosts into the reader's real flesh."
?Lauren Goff, New York Times Book Review
“American Dirt just gutted me, and I didn’t just read this book?I inhabited it….Everything about this book was so extraordinary. It’s suspenseful, the language is beautiful, and the story really opened my heart. I highly recommend it, and you will not want to put it down. It is just a magnificent novel.”
?Oprah
“I devoured the novel in a dry-eyed adrenaline rush….A profoundly moving reading experience.”
?The Washington Post
“American Dirt is an urgent, blistering, unforgettable book. In her portrayal of Lydia and Luca, a mother and son forced to leave their Mexican home, Jeanine Cummins has given face to migrants everywhere who flee violence and near-certain death in search of only one thing: a chance at life. Beautifully written, thrilling in its propulsive force, American Dirt is a new American classic.”
?Tara Conklin, author of the New York Times bestseller The Last Romantics