Tea Time Tuesday

Good evening, my Fellow Book Dragons. I hope your week is going well so far. Tonight we see not a Gem, but something more akin to silver, which can be melted down and turned into many things, cutlery, jewelry, crosses, things both sacred and profane. This is Jeanine Cummins’ “American Dirt” which all the hype promises to be one thing, but at least to me, was something else entirely.

This is the story of Lydia and her eight year old son, Luca, who lose many family members in a gangland massacre in retaliation against her journalist husband, himself among the dead, during a barbecue one Saturday afternoon. Lydia is involved peripherally, through the bookstore she owns. She understands that some members of law enforcement are on the payroll of this Cartel Don aka (“The Owl” )and his Family. There is no safe place to hide in Acapulco. She gathers what resources she can (these are substantial) and makes it to a hotel for the night. But she soon realizes The Owl has found her and so she quickly makes alternate plans. She is smart, she is resourceful. I like her very much. She is not weak or silly.

She makes contact with a family friend who could have been a great help, but alas, Ms. Cummins does not give this character the power that could have been. She turns him into a mere chauffeur. This is where I started to get a bit frustrated. For me, dear Book Dragons, what makes really good crime or thriller fiction, the kind that has me turning pages until my brain drifts off to sleep and the book slips from my claws and smacks me between the eyes, rudely waking me up, is an element of truth that runs through the book and this is where it stopped.

Lydia and her husband, Sebastian are well educated people. He is a journalist. He is a journalist who writes about the cartels. He is a journalist who reports on the cartels and tells the truth about them in a time when journalist are being picked off like metal ducks in a carnival and people are finding decapitated heads in the streets like I find pennies and old napkins. And yet, they made no plan, no arrangements in case…They did no research on what if..Lydia who reads like breathing, and loves her child fiercely, never bothered to check out what she would need in case her husband ever came up dead. Nothing at all did they do, even though her husband had taken to working out of anonymous hotel rooms and not using his name in his byline? It doesn’t ring true. And this is why.

I knew a family in a similar situation. They had, by a string of coincidences, become involved with a Very Bad Man. When they realized this was the case, they began to plan. What happens if something happens to the mother, the father or both? Where do they go, what do they do? What do they need. They ordered birth certificates and visas. They kept money. All this they did and this was not a Cartel Don and his Family.

I am not going to tell you more than that because I don’t do spoilers and to do so really spoils the story. The story itself is well written and it’s okay if you like a mother/child story and aren’t looking for what the hype around the book promises. Don Wilson calls this book “A Grapes of Wrath for our times.” if he truly believes this, he’s never read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and I hope Steinbeck comes back to haunt him for promising something the book doesn’t deliver. It’s not fair to Cummins’ either because it’s not a bad book. If you like cartel stories with more oomph, you might try Jeanine Kitchel’s “Wheel’s Up” which is based on actual events during her time in Mexico.

Join me tomorrow for Whimsical Wednesday, when we examine “Tweet Cute” by Emma Lord. Also, “The God Game” is being given away on 1/31/20 at 11:59pm est.

Until tomorrow, I remain, your humble Book Dragon, Drakon T. Longwitten.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher, Flatiron Books in a drawing.