American Dirt

by Jeanine Cummins

She doesn’t ask if he’s okay, because from now on that question will carry a weight of painful absurdity.

there was always the possibility of something, or someone, previously undiscovered.

Luca will need a ritual, a method of fashioning his grief into a thing he can exert some small control over.

That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.