The New American

by Micheline Aharonian Marcom Narrated by Timothy Andrés Pabon

Overview

This “harrowing, heartbreaking story” (Kirkus Reviews) depicts the epic journey of a young Guatemalan American college student, a “dreamer,” who gets deported and decides to make his way back home to California.

One day, Emilio learns the shocking secret: he is undocumented. His parents, who emigrated from Guatemala to California, had never told him.

Emilio slowly adjusts to his new normal. All is going well, he's in his second year at UC Berkeley...then he gets into a car accident, and-without a driver's license or any ID-the policeman on the scene reports him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Once deported to Guatemala, Emilio is determined to get back to California, the only home he has ever known. It is an epic journey that takes him across thousands of miles and eventually the Sonoran Desert of the United States-Mexico border, meeting thieves and corrupt law enforcement but also kind strangers and new friends.

Inspired in part by interviews with Central American refugees, and told in lyrical prose, Micheline Aharonian Marcom weaves a “powerful, heartbreaking” (Publishers Weekly) tale of adventure. In The New American, Marcom “depicts inhumanity with visceral force, but her bracing empathy (and hope) shines above all” (Entertainment Weekly). This is a compassionate story of one young man who risks so much to return home.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

With a thoughtful and heartfelt narration, Timothy Andrés Pabon gives voice to 21-year-old Emilio, whose undocumented status in the U.S. upends his life. After spending most of his life in California and attending college there, Emilio is deported to Guatemala when he can’t produce the police with identification after a car accident. Emilio is determined to return to his family, and Pabon creates an evocative depiction of his harrowing journey from Guatemala through the Mexican desert to Arizona. The unimaginable dangers he faces include threats of death, assault and kidnapping, police corruption, and insufficient food and water. Pabon splendidly conveys the resolve and lingering hopefulness of Emilio and his four young Honduran traveling companions—Matilde, Pedro, William, and Jonatan. An immersive and powerful listen. M.J. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

"[Marcom's] telling resonates with heartbreaking authenticity. And despite the travails she is describing, Marcom’s writing is vibrant and often poetic....Today’s headlines will not let us forget that thousands of other children riding the Bestia. Marcom’s compassionate novel illuminates their painful journey."—NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

"[An] emotionally piercing, compulsively readable novel." —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“[Marcom] depicts inhumanity with visceral force, but her bracing empathy (and hope) shines above all.”—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“Inspired in part by interviews with Central American refugees, and told in lyrical prose, Micheline Aharonian Marcom's novel The New American tracks the heart-pounding and fictional journey of a dreamer, a term referring to young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, who have lived and gone to school here, and who, in many cases, identify as American.”—FORTUNE

“Inspired by interviews with Central American refugees, the latest captivating novel by Micheline Aharonian Marcom centers a Dreamer named Emilio, who is determined to return to California after being deported.”—MS. MAGAZINE

“We need books like The New American, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom, which sweeps you into an uncomfortable reality, expands your heart, and helps you see through the eyes of a dreamer fighting to regain a lost promise. The world within its pages is unflinching and cruel but brims with hope and beauty. A catalyst for connection and empathy, The New American is also an immersive page-turner that will keep you reading eagerly to its conclusion.”—NECESSARY FICTION

“[P]owerful, heartbreaking....Marcom’s remarkable tale credibly captures the desperation and despair of those who undertake the dangerous trek north."—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Marcom has penned a lyrical mediation on being and becoming, identity and anonymity, and the ambiguity of place." – LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)

“[A] harrowing, heartbreaking story...Marcom’s plotting and pacing are well honed, and her prose is often revelatory...a gripping novel.”—KIRKUS

"[A] poetic nightmarescape that hums with foreboding and the anguish of lost innocence....Marcom masterfully navigates the graphic ugliness of deportation and anguished immigration with entreaties to a remote and capricious God, creating a tough but necessary and beautiful novel."—BOOKLIST

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

With a thoughtful and heartfelt narration, Timothy Andrés Pabon gives voice to 21-year-old Emilio, whose undocumented status in the U.S. upends his life. After spending most of his life in California and attending college there, Emilio is deported to Guatemala when he can’t produce the police with identification after a car accident. Emilio is determined to return to his family, and Pabon creates an evocative depiction of his harrowing journey from Guatemala through the Mexican desert to Arizona. The unimaginable dangers he faces include threats of death, assault and kidnapping, police corruption, and insufficient food and water. Pabon splendidly conveys the resolve and lingering hopefulness of Emilio and his four young Honduran traveling companions—Matilde, Pedro, William, and Jonatan. An immersive and powerful listen. M.J. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2020-06-03
Emilio, a "dreamer" and U.C. Berkeley student who has been deported to Guatemala, a country foreign to him, tries to return to the Bay Area home where he was raised.

Emilio’s mother, in Northern California, wants her son to stay put with a relative in rural Guatemala while an immigration attorney in the United States works on his case. But Emilio is young, bright, and afraid—that his life will pass him by waiting for the U.S. to get its immigration-policy act together and that he’ll never see his mother, two sisters, and girlfriend again. He embarks on the perilous journey back to California secretly, hoping he can make most of the trip before having to call his mother for help. Along the way, he befriends four Hondurans—Mathilde, Jonatan, Pedro, and William—and together they cross into Mexico, ride atop The Beast, the infamous freight train that travels north, and traverse the Sonoran Desert to cross the U.S.’s southern border. Marcom has crafted a harrowing, heartbreaking story. Emilio and his friends experience extreme violence and terror as well as deep wells of courage, resilience, and hope. The author explores the many ways people preserve their dignity in circumstances in which others with more power would reduce them to animals. While people do monstrous things, no one here is all monster. For every cartel henchman who abuses the migrants, there is a volunteer who offers them food, water, clothing, shelter, or words of comfort. Marcom’s plotting and pacing are well honed, and her prose is often revelatory, but a romance between Emilio and Mathilde feels jarring in its insistence on their inexhaustible nobility. Likewise, stories from other migrants riding the train, though well-told, feel like reportage conspicuously dropped into the story. The author's effort to “humanize” Emilio the Dreamer and the other Central American migrants raises questions about whom this novel is for and what it’s assuming about whose voices will be heard on migration.

A gripping novel to read alongside the work of contemporary Latinx writers.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177048161
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
He saw her standing atop the low seawall. Light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, long legs in tight blue jeans, and a smile of hello in her blue eyes. She looked happy. He shouted out to her not to go into the ocean because the tide was unpredictable and she might drown. She replied that it was safe and warm and that she was a strong swimmer and she jumped off of the low seawall fully clothed into the water below and although they were at Muir Beach the sea looked different, calmer and darker blue, abutting the stones. He felt suddenly terrified and yelled out her name, but he didn’t jump into the water after her because of the paralysis the terror caused in his body and the tide rose and took her from him. She was saying something he couldn’t hear as she drifted farther and farther out, wave upon wave, to another place in the long distance, and he felt again his grief and rage and loneliness. He wanted to follow after her, he thought perhaps she might drown, but he remained where he was next to the seawall. He saw the back of her head like the head of a small sea lion far out in the dark blue water, near the light blue sky, as she drifted now onto the widest part of the ocean. Where has she gone? he thought.

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