Cummins, whose grandmother is Puerto Rican but who identified as white as recently as 2016, was accused of appropriating and sensationalizing the migrant crisis. But American Dirt is a novel, and a thriller at that, so the angst over the accuracy of its portrayal, rather than whether the world feels authentic, seems misplaced and forced. #1 New York Times Bestseller OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK“Extraordinary.”—Stephen King“This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas. And the inability to appraise the book on its own merit as literature and, most importantly, as entertainment was certainly made worse by the fanfare that preceded its release. Cultural appropriation as a criticism often creeps into the debate when the work that is being accused of doing so simply isn’t very good. Dirt Candy is a vegetarian restaurant in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. “American Dirt,” published last week, is a fast-paced novel about a mother-and-son pair of migrants on the run from murderous drug lords. Why did she agree to the review in the first place, if she was so clearly uncomfortable putting her byline on it? Masterful.”—Sandra CisnerosTambién de este lado hay sueños. The background of the author, something that should have been an irrelevant matter, became the focal point of reviews. • Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist and the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent, 'It's unprecedented': how bookstores are handling the American Dirt controversy. Needless to say, both the Review and the publishing industry writ large have a blind spot when it comes to books about nonwhite characters. It arrived, according to another review, “on a gust of rapturous and demented praise”. Tales of non-white identity must be founded in the most reductive non-whiteness, told without nuance, curiosity or interest in examining what lies behind such experiences. On the other, she laments its “shallowness”—how the very elements that make it a good thriller prevent it from saying anything worthwhile about the situation at the southern border. This is the international story of our times. Newsletter. Sometimes, allies can be more harmful than enemies. The majority of its fiction reviewers are novelists, not professional critics, and they tend to review books with professional restraint—partly out of the sympathy that comes from toiling in the same industry and partly out of the knowledge that the situation could someday be reversed. Combine that with an almost comic fear of being canceled, and you get Groff flagellating herself in the pages of the country’s most prominent book review. It is harder to defend the book against other allegations of “trauma porn”, when decorative barbed-wire centrepieces adorned its promo events and the author herself posted an image of her “next level awesome!” barbed-wire manicure to match the book’s cover. But the manufactured hype was accompanied by a grassroots backlash. Groff’s byline was meant to signal to readers that American Dirt is also a big novel—the Review was just doing its part in the hype cycle. Groff’s review is so odd because it’s caught between these two narratives. So, I’m not really touching either of those elements in my review. “I wrestled like a beast with this review, the morals of my taking it on, my complicity in the white gaze.”. A few pages into reading Jeanine Cummins’s third novel, “ American Dirt,” I found myself so terrified that I had to pace my house. The outrage has focused on Cummins, who is of mixed Irish and Puerto Rican heritage, … The Dirt on American Dirt Published 11 months ago by Donna Miscolta When a novelist identifies as white until she writes a book about Mexican migrants in order to give a face to the “faceless brown mass” at the border, trouble follows, dirt is raised, caca is thrown. Visit her website at "American Dirt," the new novel by Jeanine Cummins, traces the journey a mother and son make to the US, after a cartel kills their family in a massacre at a quinceañera. Free UK p&p over £15 Cummins (The Crooked Branch, 2013, etc.) It needed a better one. Groff then quasi-renounced the review: “I give up,” she tweeted. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a 2019 Creative Nonfiction Writing Fellow. American Dirtfollows the journey of a mother and son fleeing Mexico for America after their entire family is murdered on the orders of a local cartel kingpin. American Dirt, the much discussed new novel from the author Jeanine Cummins, opens with a perfunctory slaughter. • American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is published by Headline (£14.99). "American Dirt," a novel that is Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick, has sparked a bitter controversy over its author's identity and portrayal of Mexican migrants. Before the slaughter, Lydia Quixano Pérez is a bookseller in Acapulco, mother to Luca and wife to journalist Sebastián. But American Dirt is a novel, and a thriller at that, so the angst over the accuracy of its portrayal, rather than whether the world feels authentic, seems misplaced and forced. , 2013, etc. hype was accompanied by a grassroots backlash —Stephen King '' this book is Mexican... Book any good then, on Sunday morning, the New York Times Bestseller OPRAH 's book CLUB PICK Extraordinary. Cummins ( the Crooked Branch, 2013, etc. rapturous and demented praise ” over `` American ’. 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