American Dirt: A Novel
By: Jeanine Cummins / Narrated By: Yareli Arizmendi
Length: 16 hrs and 55 mins
Don’t dislike it because Cummins is white and writing about brown people; dislike it cuz of sooo many other reasons
Lemme just get this out of the way: This book, American Dirt, was our pick for our little audiobook club, and I hadn’t even started it before my sister sent an NPR link of interviews regarding the book and backlash galore on so many fronts (My sister, by the way, haaaated the book, on so many levels; I dunno when I’ve seen more caps in a text…!). Then, I started seeing all sorts of really outraged diatribes. It got to the point where I was just fed up with the whole deal, and I decided to take it from minute one and judge for myself… which is kinda what I’m supposed to do with a review anyway, so there ya go. After all, you’re not going to get me on the whole: Only one race/gender/creed can write about said race/gender/creed. I mean, I thought Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen was a great book, and that was a black woman’s experiences after the Civil War… as written by Sarah Bird… who’s most definitely NOT black but tends to the whiiiiiiiter part of the spectrum. And Wally Lamb did the phenomenal She’s Come Undone, capturing a girl then woman’s confusion, pain, and hopes and dreams and the guy is totally a DUDE. So if something is well done? You go, sweetpea! Go!
And so I started minute one of the audiobook and things went downhill from there. And it only got worse.
Lydia’s a wife and mother and she and her young son are the sole survivors of a massacre that took place during her niece’s quince. Sixteen members of her family are gunned down in blood sooo cold that the killers stopped to eat barbecued chicken after the slaughterfest. Cold, I tell you! Such cold blood! And they’re such seasoned killers that they gun down EVERYone and look through the house to make sure they got EVERYone… but, like, kinda neglect looking in the shower in the bathroom, even as one of them stops to take a leak.
So Lydia and son Luca are on the run because her old buddy, who just happens to be a capo of THE major drug cartel in Acapulco, is all peeved with her and has sworn to make her suffer.
So now we have the setup for every. single. cartoon-character. Mexican stereotype to come up as the two battle their way to get to the U.S. There are individuals with hearts of gold. But more often there are the most appalling individuals/groups who do absolutely DASTardly things to Lydia and Luca, and to the two girls from Honduras (Hey, ya gotta have people escaping from Honduras, by way of Mexico City, or where’d ya be in all of this: I’m telling you how it is down there?) By the way, when Cummins starts in on how beautiful the two girls, sisters, are ya just KNOW they’re going to be violated repeatedly for the remainder of the book. And also by the way, when Cummins writes ANYbody, ya just KNOW they’re going be either the personification of border-crossing ills… or outright victims (Don’t even get me started on little Beto who has money to burn but doesn’t think to buy medicine that he’s run out of for a deadly malady!).
Okay, so let’s forget about how one traumatic thing turns into another traumatic thing which turns into yet ANOther traumatic thing (Fatigue-inducing rather than stimulating). Let’s go to the writing style which is just plain overkill. If the border was paved with this many similes, nobody would wanna cross. Cummins is so deadly excited to be using fearless language that she uses it again and again and again. And shall we get to the narration? Yareli Arizmendi does a very good job with the English-with-sporadic-Spanish-words-thrown-in. And she narrates with much, much drama. When she gets to the part with what a desert can do to a body? You can almost feeeeeel it! Why, you can almost feel it as much as when Luis Alberto Urrea wrote it the first time in The Devil’s Highway. So Arizmendi is ALMOST as good at reading Urrea’s words as Urrea is himself (And it’s kinda a sad moment when the interviewer in that NPR audio clip, found online, points out that Cummins kinda sorta lifted yet another story from Urrea; you can feel Cummins crumbling into herself. I felt bad for the poor blighted fool).
You wrap up simile overkill, and perpetual traumatic events, and head hopping between observers to the point you don’t know whose head we’re seeing events from, with a Happily Ever After? Oh my dear Accomplice! You’ve got yourself an almost 17 hour crying jag cuz really: You’re wondering what all else you COULD have been doing with those 17 hours of your life.
I’m gonna end this here and write some poetry as Sandra Cisneros advises all people who dislike the book do because disliking it means you have major issues. It’s not the book; it’s you. And Cisneros says it HAD to be written by a white woman because she, Cisneros, can’t write EVERYone’s story—which is a relief because god knows she couldn’t write her own story if The House on Mango Street is anything to go by.
But I digress yet again…
You wanna see what everyone’s talking about with this little thriller-esque piece of… work? Go for it. You wanna do something that matters with those 16+ hours? Run like the wind.
And you wanna see what life on the border is like, what crossing the border is like? Do what Cummins did and, nooooo! don’t plagiarize Urrea! nooooo! I WAS going to suggest: Listen to Urrea. He does it so well himself, and he takes it from his own life, not from research… or plagiarzing…
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