American Dirt came out in January and attracted a lot of attention. Some of that attention was no doubt the kind that author Jeanine Cummings was hoping for, taking the form of rave reviews, weeks spent on top of bestseller lists and a lucrative advance and movie deal. Other reactions weren’t so kind, focusing instead on inaccuracies and cultural stereotypes, and the validity of Cummings as an author of Irish and Puerto Rican descent telling the story of a Mexican mother and her son fleeing across the border to escape cartel violence.

I was vaguely aware at the time that there was a lot of hubbub around American Dirt, but being in the grip of migraines and not reading a huge amount, not what the content of that hubbub was. When it appeared on the Kindle daily deals a few weeks ago I remembered that it had been highly praised and smashed that Buy Now button without any further thought. So abrupt was my YOLO-purchase that I didn’t even bother to look at the author’s name.

This is how I ended up going into American Dirt assuming that the author must herself be Mexican or the child of Mexican immigrants, thinking that surely such literary powerhouses as Oprah and our friend Stephen King wouldn’t shower high praise on a writer using the experiences of an oppressed minority as fodder for a pulpy thriller.

In hindsight, I really have no idea what possessed me to think this.

Max Brooks is back, baby!

Following the success of The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z and a book about how if you find yourself in a world of mines and crafting the most important thing you can craft is you, we now have Devolution, which is jumping on board the increasingly-hot bigfoot scene that’s inexplicably growing in America. Will it kick start a sasquatchenaissance in the same way that The Zombie Survival Guide helped to revive zombie mania in the early 2000s? Maybe, but it probably doesn’t deserve to.

Going into Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, there were a few reasons I thought I wasn’t going to finish it.