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Pamela Paul

The Long Shadow of ‘American Dirt’

By Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

Three years ago this month, the novel “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins landed in bookstores on a tsunami of enthusiasm. “Extraordinary,” Stephen King wrote in a prepublication blurb. “Riveting, timely, a dazzling accomplishment,” raved Julia Alvarez. “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas,” Sandra Cisneros proclaimed. “This is the international story of our times. Masterful.”

The book’s momentum was nonstop. Riding on starred prepublication reviews from the trades, the book, a fast-paced road novel about a Mexican bookseller and her son trying to cross the border to escape a murderous drug cartel, was named an Indie Next List Pick by independent bookstores. Then came the rapturous reviews. “A thrilling adrenaline rush — and insights into the Latin American migrant experience,” raved The Washington Post. Cummins “proves that fiction can be a vehicle for expanding our empathy,” said Time magazine. Finally, the golden ticket: Oprah selected “American Dirt” for her book club. “I was opened, I was shook up, it woke me up,” Winfrey said.

It all fell apart with stunning speed. Following a blistering online campaign against the author and others involved in the book over who gets to write what, and in response to threats of violence against both author and booksellers, Cummins’s publisher, Flatiron Books, canceled her book tour. Cummins’s motives and reputation were smeared; the novel, eviscerated. “We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor ,” Flatiron’s president said in a statement.

Looking back now, it’s clear that the “American Dirt” debacle of January 2020 was a harbinger, the moment when the publishing world lost its confidence and ceded moral authority to the worst impulses of its detractors. In the years since, publishers have become wary of what is now thought of as Another American Dirt Situation, which is to say, a book that puts its author and publishing house in the line of fire. This fear now hangs over every step of a fraught process with questions over who can write what, who should blurb and who can edit permeating what feels like a minefield. Books that would once have been greenlit are now passed over; sensitivity readers are employed on a regular basis; self-censorship is rampant .

A creative industry that used to thrive on risk-taking now shies away from it. And it all stemmed from a single writer posting a discursive and furious takedown of “American Dirt” and its author on a minor blog. Whether out of conviction or cowardice, others quickly jumped on board and a social media rampage ensued, widening into the broader media. In the face of the outcry, the literary world largely folded.

“It was a witch hunt. Villagers lit their torches,” recalled the novelist and bookseller Ann Patchett, whose Nashville home Cummins stayed in after her publisher told her the tour was over. The two were up all night crying. “The fall that she took, in my kitchen, from being at the top of the world to just being smashed and in danger — it was heartbreaking.”

How did the literary world let it happen?

From the moment Cummins’s agent sent “American Dirt” out to potential publishers, it looked like a winner. The manuscript led to a bidding war among nine publishing imprints, resulting in a game-changing, seven-figure deal for its author. In the run-up to publication, as the editor of The New York Times Book Review, I asked attendees at Book Expo, then the most significant annual publishing conference, which upcoming book they were most excited about. The answer was as unanimous as I’ve ever heard: “American Dirt.” Publishers, editors, booksellers, librarians were all wildly enthusiastic: “American Dirt” wasn’t only a gripping novel — it brought attention to one of the most vexing and heartbreaking issues of our time, the border crisis. This, its champions believed, was one of those rare books that could both enthrall readers and change minds.

But in December 2019, a month before the novel’s release, Myriam Gurba, a Latina writer whose memoir, “Mean,” had been published a couple of years earlier by a small press, posted a piece that Ms. magazine had commissioned as a review of “American Dirt,” and then killed. In her blog post and accompanying review, Gurba characterized the novel as “fake-assed social justice literature,” “toxic heteroromanticism” and “sludge.” It wasn’t just that Gurba despised the book. She insisted that the author had no right to write it.

A central charge was that Cummins, who identifies as white and Latina but is not an immigrant or of Mexican heritage, wasn’t qualified to write an authentic novel about Latin American characters. Another writer soon asserted in an op-ed that the “clumsy, ill-conceived” rollout of Cummins’s novel was proof that American publishing was “broken.” The hype from the publisher, which marketed the book as “one of the most important books for our times,” was viewed as particularly damning. Echoing a number of writers and activists, the op-ed writer said it was incumbent upon Mexican Americans and their “collaborators” to resist the “ever-grinding wheels of the hit-making machine,” charging it was “unethical” to allow Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power. More than 100 writers put their names to a letter scolding Oprah for her choice .

Never mind that for years, Oprah had championed a diverse range of authors and been a huge booster of the book world. Or that a publisher will use whatever it can, whether wild hyperbole about a book’s merits or a marathon of reliable blurbers, to make a novel work given the unpredictable vicissitudes of public taste.

But an influential swath of the literary world clearly felt galvanized by the charges.

In one of those online firestorms the world has come to recognize and occasionally regret, activists, writers, self-appointed allies and Twitter gunslingers competed to show who was more affronted by the crime of the novel’s success. “American Dirt” was essentially held responsible for every instance in which another Latino writer’s book got passed over, poorly reviewed or remaindered.

As the story gained traction, the target kept moving. According to her critics, it was the author’s fault for not doing better research, for not writing a more literary novel, for writing a “white savior story,” for inaccurately reflecting aspects of Mexican culture, for resorting to negative stereotypes. It was the florist’s fault for repurposing the barbed wire motif on the book’s cover as part of the arrangements at a launch dinner. It was the publisher’s fault for mounting a “ perfectly orchestrated mega-budget campaign” on behalf of a white, one-quarter Puerto Rican author rather than for other, more marginalized Latino voices. The blurbs for “American Dirt” were too laudatory. The advance was too big. There were accusations of cultural appropriation, a nebulous and expansive concept whose adherents will parse from homage, appreciation or cultural exchange according to rules known only to them.

What should have been done instead? Should the publisher have pushed back on the blurbers, asking them to tone down their praise? Should Cummins have balked at the advance, saying it was too much money, given some back? Would anyone have gotten this upset had Cummins received $50,000 and a few tepid notes of praise from writer friends?

Many of Cummins’s fans went silent, too scared to mount any kind of public defense. In conversations at the time, a number of novelists — from all backgrounds and ethnicities — told me privately they were afraid the rage would come for them, for earlier novels they’d written in which they’d imagined other people’s lives, other people’s voices. For future novels they wanted to write that dared traverse the newly reinforced DMZ lines of race, ethnicity, gender and genre. (Even now, three years later, many of Cummins’s early champions I contacted were wary of going on the record for fear of poking the bear; many people in the publishing world would speak to me only off the record. Macmillan, the imprint’s house, did not respond to a request for comment.)

And so, the accusations went largely uncontested. Macmillan submitted to a round of self-flagellating town halls with its staff. Cummins lay low, having become something of a pariah among her professional peers. Since publication, I have been told, not a single author in America has asked her to blurb a book.

Some calls for change that came out of the firestorm were well founded — in particular, the call to diversify a largely white and well-heeled industry. Publishing, an exciting but demanding and notoriously low-paying job, isn’t for everyone. But it should certainly be open to and populated by people of all backgrounds and tastes. Black editors interested in foreign policy and science fiction, Latino editors interested in emerging conservative voices or horror, graduates from small colleges in the South interested in Nordic literature in translation. People from all walks of life who are open to all kinds of stories from all kinds of authors can bring a breadth of ideas to a creative industry.

Yet in their assertion that the publisher somehow “made” this book succeed in ways they wouldn’t for another Latino author, the novel’s critics misunderstood several fundamentals about how publishing works. First, it is a business, and one in which most novels fail. If publishing were as monolithic and all-knowing as many critics seemed to presume, publishers would make every novel succeed. If all it took was throwing marketing muscle behind a novel and soliciting every over-the-top blurb possible, then publishing wouldn’t be such a low-margin business. When a book proposal comes along that generates huge excitement and the prospect of success, naturally publishers will jump on it, spend the money they need to win the contract and do everything they can to recoup their investment. For most authors, a six- or seven-figure advance is a shocking windfall; most books typically do not earn back the advance in sales. Publishing is full of authors and editors who believe in their books, only to be disappointed.

Many critics of “American Dirt” also made cynical assumptions about the author. In their view, Jeanine Cummins set out to profit off the tragedy of the border crisis. Tellingly, most didn’t consider that Cummins might have had any motivation beyond money.

Think about what could have been.

The response from other Latino writers and the larger literary world could have been yes to this book and to this author, who made an effort to explore lives other than her own, as well as, yes to a memoir by a Honduran migrant, for example, and yes to a reported border narrative by a Texan journalist and yes to a collection by a Mexican American poet. A single book, whether perfect or flawed — and negative reviews are entirely fair game — cannot be expected to represent an entire people, regardless of how it is written or marketed. Instead of shutting down this particular author in the name of a larger cause — its own form of injustice — the response from fellow Latino writers could have been more generous.

The outcry among its detractors was so thunderous, it was hard to see at the time that the response to “American Dirt” wasn’t entirely grim. There was no significant outcry outside the American literary world’s cloistered purview. And significantly, the novel was translated into 37 languages, selling well over three million copies worldwide.

The novelist, filmmaker and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (“Amores Perros,” “21 Grams”) says that in Mexico, the novel was read and appreciated. “As a Mexican born and raised, I didn’t feel the least uncomfortable with what Jeanine did,” Arriaga told me. “I think it’s completely valid to write whatever you want on whatever subject you want. Even if she exaggerated the narco aspect, that’s the privilege of an artist.” When Arriaga discusses the novel with book clubs in Mexico, he says, nobody raises the concept of cultural appropriation.

A few Latino writers stood up publicly in Cummins’s defense. “The author is getting a lot of crap for stuff she is not responsible for,” Sandra Cisneros said in a contentious public radio segment largely devoted to other people calling Cummins out. “If you don’t like the story, OK, that’s what she wrote and that’s her story,” Cisneros continued, urging people to “read this book with an open heart. If you don’t like it, put it down.”

Readers, the people for whom books are actually written, were otherwise largely ignored in the debate. But it turned out that many readers kept an open mind, with little patience for the mine-not-yours tussles that animated Twitter and its amplifiers. Here in America, the novel debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, where it stayed for 36 weeks. That’s the power of a book that resonates.

But if the proposal for “American Dirt” landed on desks today, it wouldn’t get published.

“In the past two or three years, there’s a lot of commentary about the publishing industry being increasingly eager to appease potential cancelers, to not get into trouble to begin with, to become fearful and conformist,” says Bernard Schweizer, a professor emeritus of English at Long Island University who is founding a small publishing company, Heresy Press , with his wife, Liang, to take on the kind of riskier work that now gets passed over. According to Schweizer, the publisher will look for work “that lies between the narrow ideological, nonaesthetic interests presently flourishing on both the left and the right” and “won’t blink at alleged acts of cultural appropriation.” As he told me: “The point is not to offend but to publish stories that are unfettered and freewheeling, maybe nonconformist in one way or another. Somebody may be offended or not, but that’s the kind of risk we want to take.”

For some aspiring writers, the mood remains pessimistic. “My take is the only take and the one everyone knows to be true but only admits in private: the literary world only accepts work that aligns with the progressive/woke point of view of rich coastal liberals,” the Latino writer Alex Perez said in an interview with Hobart magazine last fall. “This explains why everything reads and sounds the same, from major publishing houses to vanity zines with a readership of 15.” Shortly after publication of Perez’s interview, Hobart’s staff of editors quit and Perez was widely mocked on social media. Elizabeth Ellen, Hobart’s editor and the person who conducted the interview, posted a letter from the editor advocating for an atmosphere “in which fear is not the basis of creation, nor the undercurrent of discussion.”

History has shown that no matter how much critics, politicians and activists may try, you cannot prevent people from enjoying a novel. This is something the book world, faced with ongoing threats of book banning, should know better than anyone else.

“We can be appalled that people are saying, ‘You can’t teach those books. You can’t have Jacqueline Woodson in a school library.’ But you can’t stand up for Jeanine Cummins?” Ann Patchett said. “It just goes both ways. People who are not reading the book themselves are telling us what we can and cannot read? Maybe they’re not pulling a book from a classroom, but they’re still shaming people so heavily. The whole thing makes me angry, and it breaks my heart.”

Much remains broken in its wake. Jeanine Cummins may have made money, but at a great emotional, social and reputational cost. She wrote a book filled with empathy. The literary world showed her none.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

Pamela Paul became an Opinion columnist for The Times in 2022. She was the editor of The New York Times Book Review for nine years and is the author of eight books, including “100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet.”

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Why Is Everyone Arguing About the Novel American Dirt ?

On January 21, Oprah Winfrey announced her latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, the new novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins . Winfrey tweeted: “From the first sentence, I was IN … Like so many of us, I’ve read newspaper articles and watched television news stories and seen movies about the plight of families looking for a better life, but this story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way.” Winfrey also posted a video of her endorsement to the Oprah’s Book Club Twitter account, saying, “I was opened, I was shook up, it woke me up, and I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom. So I want you to read. Come read with us, and then join the conversation with Jeanine Cummins on Apple TV+ coming this March.”

Book Twitter reacted to the announcement with swiftness , although perhaps not in the way Oprah’s team would have wanted, citing the recent #OwnVoices movement . American Dirt has been the subject of controversy and criticism since 2019, when early readers first offered their opinions after seeing advance copies. The book has been called “ stereotypical ,” and “ appropriative ” for “ opportunistically, selfishly, and parasitically ” telling the fictional story of a Mexican mother and son’s journey to the border after a cartel murders the rest of their family. One of the more common knocks is that the book engages in “ brownface ,” incorporating a nominally Mexican perspective that was written by a woman who — as recently as 2016 — identified as “white.” In the lead-up to American Dirt ’s release, Cummins revealed she has a Puerto Rican grandmother . The conversation surrounding American Dirt’ s “ripped from the headlines” approach to telling this migrant story in an American voice for American readers places it within ongoing debates in the lit world about who can tell what stories .

Some professional critics also had at American Dirt in the days before its January 21 release. New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal said that the “rapturous and demented praise” the book has received in the press might be owed in part to the fact that “tortured sentences aside, American Dirt is enviably easy to read” and “determinedly apolitical. The deep roots of these forced migrations are never interrogated; the American reader can read without fear of uncomfortable self-reproach.” Some of that praise also comes from the Times ; in the Book Review , Lauren Groff was ultimately ambivalent but called the book “propulsive” and “swift,” and regarded its polemical “uncomplicated moral universe” as a feature rather than a bug. Groff (who, for the record, is white) praises Cummins’s efforts and excuses her appropriation, whereas Sehgal (who is not) questions Cummins’s stated motivation in writing this story:

Shouldn’t the story matter, her effort to individuate people portrayed as a “faceless brown mass” (her words)? In the book’s afterword, she agonizes about not being the right person to write the book (“I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”) but decides that she has a moral obligation to the story.

Groff caused an even further Twitter stir when the New York Times Books account tweeted a link to her review with this ( since-deleted ) pull quote: “‘American Dirt’ is one of the most wrenching books I have read in a few years, with the ferocity and political reach of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s novel.” Groff responded : “Please take this down and post my actual review.” Apparently this quote was from an “early version” of her review, to which she had made “radical changes.” Still, this gaffe was enough to ignite Twitter discourse about who should have the platform to review certain stories, in addition to who should write them.

After Oprah announced Jeanine Cummins’s controversial American Dirt as her latest Book Club pick, immigration reporter Aura Bogado shared a tweet the author posted back in November, showcasing a “pretty” nail-art interpretation of her book jacket, which features a barbed-wire design. Bogado critiqued Cummins’s “vulgar pleasure of proudly wearing this exact symbol of oppression as a fashion statement,” sparking a new wave of outrage over what’s seen as a blatant visual representation of how Cummins is insensitively capitalizing on immigrant trauma.

Then on January 26, Oprah posted a two-minute video to the Oprah’s Book Club Instagram, announcing that as a response to the “outpouring … of very passionate opinions,” she spoke with members of the Latinx community about their concerns with American Dirt and will air an Apple TV+ event in March to “bring people together from all sides to talk about this book, and who gets to publish what stories. I’m hoping that that is going to resonate with many of you and your concerns.”

After this announcement, writers Roberto Lovato, David Bowles, and Myriam Gurba began tweeting under the hashtag #DignidadLiteraria as a “call to politico-literary action,” and many authors and activists are using the hashtag along with # ownvoices in their calls for better representation. Vox reported that Immigrant Youth Group United We Dream is petitioning Oprah to include more Latinx and immigrant authors in the Book Club. On January 27, the Oprah’s Book Club Instagram account moved forward as usual, posting the reading schedule for American Dirt . The account posted the schedule with the caption: “Over the next several weeks we will be using this platform to share a diverse array of content, including books by Mexican and Latinx authors. More to come.”

On January 29, American Dirt ’s publisher Flatiron Books released a statement from its president, Bob Miller, about how they were “surprised by the anger that has emerged from members of the Latinx and publishing communities” in response to the book’s release and Flatiron’s role in tone-deaf publicity. Miller acknowledges “serious mistakes,” such as barbed-wire centerpieces at a bookseller dinner, and that they “should not have said that Jeanine’s husband was an undocumented immigrant while not specifying that he was from Ireland.” In the statement, Miller announced that Flatiron will cancel the book tour, citing “concerns about safety” and “specific threats to booksellers and the author.”

Many replies to this statement find it to be inadequate, using language of “white privilege,” “victimhood,” and “dog whistling” to frame Latinx concerns about the book as violent and scary, rather than simply writing an apology with a promise to improve their practices. Many commenters took issue with passages from the statement, like “it’s unfortunate that she is the recipient of hatred from within the very communities she sought to honor. We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well-intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor.”

At the end of the statement, Miller announced that in place of the book tour, Flatiron Books will organize a town-hall series “where Jeanine will be joined by some of the groups who have raised objections to the book.” There are no further details yet about this series of meetings.

On February 4 at a pre-Oscars brunch event in Beverly Hills called “Defining Women: The Power of Lifting Up Women’s Voices From Hollywood to Washington, D.C.,” Eva Longoria drew a connection between the American Dirt controversy and similar concerns over white gatekeeping in Hollywood. InStyle quoted her saying :

“I have not read the book. I will not read the book. It’s just parallel and synonymous with what’s happening in entertainment, what’s happening in government. The gatekeepers of the industries do not reflect the people and the consumers that they serve,” Longoria said. “That’s the problem.”

“There’s a bidding war over this book, which means  all the publishers  wanted this book. And they wanted some sort of way in to a different community. The problem with that is that the publishing industry is 80% white, from agents to editors and publicists.”

Longoria also critiqued Flatiron for the way it handled concerns from the Latinx community about American Dirt, saying, “What made me really upset was when the publisher said, ‘We had to cancel the book tour because of safety concerns,’ which made my community look like we’re crazy people going to cause trouble. We’re not. We’re just being outspoken about the inaccuracies of what this book represents.” Longoria also endorsed novels that depict similar stories to American Dirt that were actually written by Latinx authors — Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario, and The Beast by Óscar Martínez. But, as Longoria pointed out, “Oprah didn’t pick them.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, American Dirt has already been optioned for a movie adaptation by Charles Leavitt, the writer of Blood Diamond , and Imperative Entertainment, the production company behind Clint Eastwood’s The Mule . While you wait for that come out, you can add your name to a 150-plus person hold list for American Dirt at your local library and catch Oprah’s Apple TV+ feature on it in March.

This post has been updated throughout.

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• oprah winfrey
• oprah's book club

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

AMERICAN DIRT

by Jeanine Cummins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 21, 2020

Intensely suspenseful and deeply humane, this novel makes migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border indelibly...

This terrifying and tender novel is a blunt answer to the question of why immigrants from Latin America cross the U.S. border—and a testimony to the courage it takes to do it.

Cummins ( The Crooked Branch , 2013, etc.) opens this propulsive novel with a massacre. In a pleasant Acapulco neighborhood, gunmen slaughter 16 people at a family barbecue, from a grandmother to the girl whose quinceañera they are celebrating. The only survivors are Lydia, a young mother, and her 8-year-old son, Luca. She knows they must escape, fast and far. 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. 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. 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. 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. Peril and brutality follow them, but they also encounter unexpected generosity and heroism. Lydia and Luca are utterly believable characters, and their breathtaking journey moves with the velocity and power of one of those freight trains.

Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-20976-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

Share your opinion of this book

More by Jeanine Cummins

BOOK REVIEW

by Jeanine Cummins

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE GREAT ALONE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018

A tour de force.

In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.

After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s ( The Nightingale , 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017

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