For this installment of our weekly book reviews from Booklist, the American Library Association’s nationally distributed book and media review publication, we have a review of the novel, “América del Norte” by Mexican journalist Nicolás Medina Mora, first published in the May 2024 issue of Booklist.
Enjoy.
“América del Norte”
By Nicolás Medina Mora. 2024. 480p. Soho.
The breezy, buoyant debut by Mexican journalist Medina Mora weaves together hundreds of years of Mexican history and culture with the frequently satiric story of young writer and narrator Sebastian Arteaga y Salazar (who shares some similarities with the author). In 2017, Sebastian is attempting to continue his 10-year stay in the U.S. despite the current president’s attacks on immigration. He also struggles to write a book, deals with his clueless undergraduate students at an Iowa university, copes with an on-and-off romance with an American woman (who has had a a series of lovers from Latin America), and visits his friends and cancer-stricken mother in Mexico City. The heir of a powerful family of Austro-Hungarian immigrants to Mexico, Sebastian intersperses his story with a dizzying series of vignettes about figures from and periods of Mexican history, presumably taken from the many versions of the book he’s been trying for years to complete. Readers willing to go along for a kaleidoscopic and occasionally overwhelming journey will get to know Sebastian’s Mexico and unique point of view.—Margaret Quamme
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