Jeanine Cummins’ ‘American Dirt’ Is a Harrowing Tale of Immigration, Family and Memory

Jeanine Cummins' highly anticipated fourth book, American Dirt, opens with the kind of massacre that has become terribly familiar to those forced to live in the cross fire of Mexican drug cartels. At her niece's quinceañera in Acapulco, a middle-class Mexican bookstore owner named Lydia shields her son in a shower stall while sicario gunmen murder the rest of their family, 16 people in total, in a merciless hail of gunfire.