So last week, when Oprah announced that American Dirt would be the next book discussed in her book club, the news was treated not as the crown jewel in the coronation of the novel of the season, but as a slightly awkward development for Oprah. In fact, she seemed to fetishize the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings. ( She has since begun to discuss a Puerto Rican grandmother.) Cummins had written a story that was not hers - and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it. Another critic revealed that she’d written a review panning the book, too, and the magazine that commissioned her review killed it.Īll of these negative reviews centered on one major problem: American Dirt is a book about Mexican migrants, and author Jeanine Cummins has identified as white, calling her family mostly white “in every practical way” a few years ago. One of those New York Times reviews was a pan, the other was mixed at best. The New York Times had it reviewed twice - once in the daily paper, once in the weekly Book Review - in addition to interviewing the author and publishing an excerpt from the novel.īut as the publication date approached, the narrative around American Dirt has changed. (For most authors, a print run of 20,000 is pretty good.) It received glowing blurbs from luminaries like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Sandra Cisneros. Flatiron announced a first print run of 500,000 copies. It sold to Flatiron Books at auction for a reported seven-figure advance. The new novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, officially released on January 21, was anointed the biggest book of the season well before it came out.

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