Enrique’s Journey
Abandoning a child at a young age to migrate to another country is both tragic and heartbreaking, but in most cases, this becomes the only option for most parents. In the novel, Enrique’s Journey, the mother of a five year old boy decides to leave her life and her son behind in Honduras to seek opportunities in The United States. Enrique, the five year boy, was left with a father who wanted nothing to do with him and who started his own life with another family excluding Enrique. Fed up with little communication with his mother and abandonment from his father, a fourteen year old Enrique decides to set out on a journey from Central America to North Carolina where his mother has been for the past six years of his life. The author, Sonia Nazario, wrote the biography of a young boy embarking on a journey in search of his long lost mother. The genre of this novel like I mentioned before is a biography since the story is based on real events that Enrique lived through in order to get to his mother, but it could also be considered an adventure because of the terrifying obstacles he had to triumph over to get to his destination, such as pass “La Tren de la Muerte,” which translates to The Train of Death in Mexico. I chose Enrique’s Journey as my Outside Reading book because I have always been interesting in learning more about immigration, which is the main topic in this novel. I was also interested because this book’s setting is where my family is from, which is Honduras. The protagonist is the main character Enrique and the antagonists are the policemen of Mexico, who were the ones that assaulted innocent people traveling through Mexico and stealing from them. There were many supporting characters, but the most important were his mother, Lourdes and his girlfriend, Maria Isabel.
There were many central conflicts throughout the book, some more obvious than others like man vs. society, which was Enrique versus the police officers and gang members located in Mexico. Another central conflict was man vs. self, which was Enrique versus his own demons. Even though Enrique’s mother abandoned him for beneficial reasons, the abandonment from both of his parents left him to isolate himself and turn to drugs and alcohol and started his addiction. The theme that I got out of this is determination because even though his mother left him at a young age and this journey seemed impossible, Enrique never wanted to give up his goal to get to the United States and hopefully be reunited with his mother once again. The author did not really use symbols or literary devices besides similes such as like or as or the climax, which was one of the more interesting parts of the book.
Sonia Nazario’s writing style is very unique compared to other authors. She has very short sentences and is very straight to the point unlike Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, who would write lists that were paragraphs long. Other than that, I really enjoyed the book because Nazario gave plenty of information towards the topic of immigrants who have migrated to other countries and the struggles that they go through just to make it from point A to point B. This also gave me insights on the situations that citizens of Honduras are facing economically right now. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is curious about immigration and hear from the people who are living and breathing in that situation every single day or just anyone who wants to read a well-written novel because it really is a tragic but thrilling book that will keep anyone who is reading it on the edge of their seat.