How Not to Write a Book Review

But the manufactured hype was accompanied by a grassroots backlash. Cummins, whose grandmother is Puerto Rican but who identified as white as recently as 2016, was accused of appropriating and sensationalizing the migrant crisis. In December, the writer Myriam Gurba wrote that Cummins had “identified the gringo appetite for Mexican pain and found a way to exploit it.” Another writer, David Bowles, wrote that the book’s reception was “especially harmful because authentic stories by Mexicanas and Chicanas are either passed over or published to significantly less fanfare.” In an apparent attempt to preempt criticism, Cummins tacked on a tortured afterword to the book, in which she conceded, “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it.”

It didn’t mollify anyone. The critical coup de grâce came when The New York Times’ own Parul Sehgal eviscerated the book on both moral and literary grounds: In American Dirt, the “deep roots of these forced migrations are never interrogated; the American reader can read without fear of uncomfortable self-reproach,” she wrote.

Groff’s review is so odd because it’s caught between these two narratives. On the one hand, she writes that it is a pitch-perfect thriller, causing her to pace the house, anxious about the fates of Cummins’s characters. On the other, she laments its “shallowness”—how the very elements that make it a good thriller prevent it from saying anything worthwhile about the situation at the southern border. Should Cummins have written the book? Groff doesn’t know. Should she have reviewed it? She doesn’t know! “Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism; at the same time, weeks after finishing it, the novel remains alive in me,” she writes.