My rating: 4 of 5 stars
For many years now, people have been crossing the U.S.’s southern border, legally or illegally, in search of the American Dream. What is not always mentioned in that tale is how often the children of those who cross the border are left behind for long stretches of time. What does that do to relationships between parents and their children? And what happens when they are reunited? This memoir answers those questions as Ms. Grande chronicles her own life of poverty, abandonment, and abuse from her childhood in Mexico to her graduation from college in California.
The book starts with Ms. Grande’s mother leaving their home in Iguala, Mexico, to join her husband in the United States, “El Otro Lado.” Ms. Grande and her siblings, Mago and Carlos, live a life of poverty with their grandparents and the short spurts when their mother comes back to take care of them. When their long absent father returns and gives them a chance to go to the U.S. with them, they soon find themselves in “El Otro Lado” and given opportunities they never could’ve had in Mexico. However, they soon learn that the father they dreamed of having is nothing like the father they actually have to live with.
This was a very difficult for me to rate because it is so damn depressing. Never before has a book made me want to cry with every chapter. The circumstances that Ms. Grande and her siblings find themselves in just wrenches at your heart and there are very few moments where the mood lightens until the very end. And yet, Ms. Grande’s style is compelling. Her use of rhetorical questions throughout puts you in the mind of a child dealing with abandonment and abuse throughout her young life. It makes the ending of the book very well earned.
This is not a book to lull you to sleep. Indeed, you will want to keep some Kleenex handy for those awful tear-jerking moments, of which there are a lot. This is a book for fans of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and other memoirs of poverty.
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