At a bank in the border town of Nogales, a Mexican woman named Lydia attempts to withdraw cash from her dead mother’s account. She needs $11,000 to pay a smuggler to lead her and her 9-year-old son into the United States. But when the bank manager asks for documentation, Lydia can’t supply any. Less than two weeks earlier, her mother, her husband and the rest of her family were murdered at an afternoon barbecue. Lydia and her son, Luca, have since then been on the run. Up to this point, two-thirds of the way through Jeanine Cummins’ thrilling and devastating “American Dirt,” I’d devoured the novel in a dry-eyed adrenalin rush. Lydia, Luca and the teenage Honduran sisters they’re traveling with – who are fleeing gang violence – leap on top of freight trains. They endure kidnapping, rape and the constant threat of death. “If there’s one good thing about terror,” Lydia thinks wryly, “it’s that it’s more immediate than grief.”
