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“American Dirt” has also generated criticism.

“We’re always looking for the great American story, and this is the great story of the Americas, at a time in which borders are blurred.” “It’s written in a form that will engage people, not just the choir, but people who might think differently,” Cisneros said. Sandra Cisneros, the author of the best-selling novel “The House on Mango Street,” said she hoped that “American Dirt” could help highlight the obstacles migrants face, particularly for American readers who might otherwise be indifferent to the subject. It received ecstatic advance reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, which called it “intensely suspenseful and deeply humane.” Blockbuster authors like Stephen King and John Grisham have heaped praise on the book, and Cummins received support from prominent Mexican-American and Latina authors, including Erika Sánchez, Reyna Grande and Julia Alvarez, who predicted the book would “change hearts and transform policies.” 21 with a hefty first printing of half a million copies, set off a bidding war between nine publishers and sold to Flatiron Books in a seven-figure deal. Whether or not it succeeds in reshaping readers’ views, “American Dirt” - which chronicles Lydia and Luca’s grueling and treacherous journey of more than 1,000 miles - seems poised to become one of this year’s biggest breakout works of fiction. The character’s insight is a deliberate provocation by the author, who wants readers to reckon with the humanitarian cost of America’s broken immigration policies. “She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite, how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option.” “All her life she’s pitied those poor people,” Cummins writes.

As she researches what they will need to survive the journey, it dawns on Lydia that she and Luca aren’t pretending. Traumatized and desperate, Lydia hatches a risky escape plan: She and Luca will disguise themselves as migrants and attempt to cross the border into Arizona. Lydia and her 8-year-old son, Luca, are fleeing from their home in Acapulco, Mexico, after hit men from a drug cartel killed 16 members of their family. During one of many harrowing moments in Jeanine Cummins’s new novel, “American Dirt,” the protagonist, a bookstore owner named Lydia, has a jarring realization.