Read this for school. Wasn’t my favorite, but still a good book. The stories told are not nearly publicized enough and are really eye-opening. This book has the potential to change a lot of minds about immigration issues, all while being pretty entertaining and entirely true. Originally a newspaper series, this book is amazingly well-researched and beautifully told. Just a little boring and slow at times, but it is nonfiction and the facts do need to be delivered.

This took me 8,000 years because 1) it's so depressing and 2) I had to read it for class. Feel like it's not terribly new information for anyone who has been even kind of clued in on immigration, but it definitely is brutal. Idk, it's hard to rate this. I'm going with three stars not necessarily for the content, but just because I don't really like how it's written. Its relevance is evergreen and I think people who are more in the dark about immigration (especially with regards to Latinx American countries and their relationships within the region) would really learn a lot with this book, so it can be hard to rate nonfiction like this without it being a commentary on the content. It's more that the book feels like it repeats major parts of itself in kind of a disorganised way, which is hard when a lot of the content Nazario reports is brutal and graphic. It felt less like it was reporting on Enrique's life, and more like a laundry list of brutality. I think it was easier for me to connect the dots Nazario was writing on why people feel forced to emigrate, but I'm unsure how much the dots are clear for someone who goes into this book knowing very little about immigration, or who might feel really antagonistic about immigrants. I wasn't reading this looking for joy or satisfaction or even a good time, but I also would like to read something without feeling absolutely hopeless and cold. It's probably a "me thing", not vibing with Nazario's style, but I felt like her particular brand of journalism is relatively unbiased and unfeeling. To a large extent, journalism has to be like that, but it felt like this book suffered because of it.