Review: Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
Wow. This book is something special.
Infinite Country by Patricia Engel is the story of a family separated by borders and by immigration status, partly in the United States and partly in Colombia. This is a character-focused story that switches from family member to family member, following parents Elena and Mauro as they meet and move to the US and their children Karina, Nando, and Talia, the younger two of whom have US citizenship. The story starts out with 15-year-old Talia in Colombia breaking out of a court-appointed girl's home she was put in after she assaults a man who killed a kitten in front of her in order to make it to her father's house in time to be able to catch the flight that will take her to her mother in the US.
The only negatives I could level at this book were that it was a little slow, and I didn't quite know what was going on in the beginning. This was relatively negligible; the book is under 200 pages and does manage to get a lot into those pages; as you learn new information, you continuously re-contextualize the information from earlier in the book, certainly not enough of an issue to knock it down a star.
This book made my heart ache over and over again. You will yearn for the reunion of this family, for the sense of loss at the prospect of leaving either country for the other, for the way that in either place, this family will face a set of problems that are so unfair, especially for the children that are so affected, but also for the parents. I wasn't sure this book was going to make me cry while I was reading the first half of the book, but I certainly cried a lot in the second half. I read this book in a single day, starting the audiobook on a long drive at around ten am and finishing when I was walking my dog at around six. The story is so short and compelling I am sure if I had read it with my eyes, I would have finished it in a single day as well, probably a single sitting.
I gave this book five stars. If you like stories about family, migration, the real-world impacts of political decisions, or multi-POV slice of life type stories, I would highly suggest you read this book. It really is special, and I hope that it continues to find readers that love it so much.
