This week’s reviews: Jeanine Cummins and Lili Wilkinson
Dear Subscribers: We’re very sorry that due to a technical issue (now fixed) email notifications didn’t go out this week when we posted our new reviews. So here they are for you now. We hope, as always, that you enjoy them. — Jean and Linda
JEANINE CUMMINS American Dirt. Reviewed by Robert Goodman
Jeanine Cummins’s novel about the journey of a Mexican mother and son fleeing to the US has sparked a storm of controversy.
American Dirt opens with a scene that is as shocking as it is gripping. Eight-year-old Luca is going to the toilet when a bullet fired from downstairs narrowly misses him. The next thing he knows he is cowering in the shower with his mother, Lydia; below them, assassins systematically slaughter his whole family. This is modern Acapulco, a former holiday town now firmly in the grip of the drug cartels. Knowing that the police will do little to help, and many will already be in the pockets of those who commissioned the killings, Lydia has no choice but to take Luca, grab what she can and run, knowing that it may be impossible to escape the long arm of the Mexican cartels.
Read the rest of this review here.
LILI WILKINSON After the Lights Go Out. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
An outback mining town is the setting for the apocalypse in Lili Wilkinson’s novel.
In a parallel universe, a version of me gets to have a normal life, where ‘being prepared’ means bringing a cardigan…
Pru’s father is a doomsday prepper. She and her twin sisters are home-schooled in a small mining town in the Australian outback, receiving lessons in wilderness survival, resource rationing and keeping their bunker secret. When the unthinkable happens, and the apocalypse they’ve been drilled to prepare for actually occurs, 17-year-old Pru is left to look after her younger sisters, putting a lot of strain on their relationship. But her training wars with her conscience: can she really watch everyone else starve in order to protect her family?
Read the rest of this review here.
