![]() ![]() ![]() She vividly recounts their harrowing travels for more than 1,000 miles by bus, atop a lethally dangerous freight train, and finally on foot across the implacable Sonoran Desert. Cummins does a splendid job of capturing Lydia’s and Luca’s numb shock and then panic in the aftermath of the shootings, then their indomitable will to survive and reach el norte-any place they might go in Mexico is cartel territory, and any stranger might be an assassin. Lydia knows there is more to it, that her friendship with a courtly older man who has become her favorite customer at the small bookstore she runs is a secret key, and that she and her son are marked for death. ![]() Lydia’s husband, Sebastián, is among the dead he was a fearless journalist whose coverage of the local cartel, Los Jardineros, is the reason los sicarios were sent, as the sign fastened to his dead chest makes clear. She knows they must escape, fast and far. ![]() The only survivors are Lydia, a young mother, and her 8-year-old son, Luca. In a pleasant Acapulco neighborhood, gunmen slaughter 16 people at a family barbecue, from a grandmother to the girl whose quinceañera they are celebrating. border-and a testimony to the courage it takes to do it.Ĭummins ( The Crooked Branch, 2013, etc.) opens this propulsive novel with a massacre. This terrifying and tender novel is a blunt answer to the question of why immigrants from Latin America cross the U.S. ![]()
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