enrique's journey new york times

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Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother Paperback – January 2, 2007

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• Reading age 12 years and up
• Print length 299 pages
• Language English
• Lexile measure 830L
• Dimensions 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Publisher Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Publication date January 2, 2007
• ISBN-10 0812971787
• ISBN-13 978-0812971781
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Later Printing edition (January 2, 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 299 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812971787
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812971781
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 12 years and up
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 830L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• #16 in Emigrants & Immigrants Biographies
• #16 in Children's Studies Social Science (Books)
• #20 in Emigration & Immigration Studies (Books)

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Customer Review: A real book with real people and a fascinating story!!!

About the author

Sonia nazario.

Sonia Nazario (www.enriquesjourney.com) has spent 20 years reporting and writing about social issues, most recently as a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her stories have tackled some of this country's most intractable problems: hunger, drug addiction, immigration.

She has won numerous national journalism and book awards and has been named among the most influential Latinos by Hispanic Business Magazine and a "trendsetter" by Hispanic Magazine. In 2012 Columbia Journalism Review named Nazario among "40 women who changed the media business in the past 40 years."

In 2003, her story of a Honduran boy's struggle to find his mother in the U.S., entitled "Enrique's Journey," won more than a dozen awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, the George Polk Award for International Reporting, the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists Guillermo Martinez-Marquez Award for Overall Excellence.

Expanded into a book, Enrique's Journey became a national bestseller, won two book awards, and is required reading for all incoming freshmen at 21 universities and dozens of high schools nationwide. It has been selected as a "One City, One Book" read by five cities, and is being made into a movie by Lifetime.

In 1998, Nazario was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on children of drug addicted parents. And in 1994, she won a George Polk Award for Local Reporting for a series about hunger among schoolchildren in California.

Nazario, who grew up in Kansas and in Argentina, has written extensively from Latin America and about Latinos in the United States. She is a graduate of Williams College and has a master's degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She began her career at the Wall Street Journal, where she reported from four bureaus: New York, Atlanta, Miami, and Los Angeles. In 1993, she joined the Los Angeles Times. She is now at work on her second book.

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Reviews of Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Enrique's Journey

by Sonia Nazario

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Biography & Memoir
• History, Current Affairs and Religion
• Central & S. America, Mexico, Caribbean
• Contemporary
• Adult-YA Crossover Fiction
• Immigrants & Expats
• Latinx Authors

Rate this book

About this Book

• Reading Guide

Book Summary

A true story from award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounting the odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.

In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States. When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade. Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her. Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother's North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can – clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains. With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother's side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte- The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope - and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States. Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique's Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.

The Boy Left Behind

The boy does not understand. His mother is not talking to him. She will not even look at him. Enrique has no hint of what she is going to do. Lourdes knows. She understands, as only a mother can, the terror she is about to inflict, the ache Enrique will feel, and fi­nally the emptiness. What will become of him? Already he will not let anyone else feed or bathe him. He loves her deeply, as only a son can. With Lourdes, he is openly affectionate. "Dame pico, mami. Give me a kiss, Mom," he pleads, over and over, pursing his lips. With Lourdes, he is a chatterbox. "Mira, mami. Look, Mom," he says softly, asking her questions about everything he sees. With­out her, he is so shy it is crushing. Slowly, she walks out onto the porch. Enrique clings to her pant leg. Beside her, he is tiny. Lourdes loves him so much she cannot bring herself to say a word. She cannot carry his pic­ture. It would melt her resolve. She cannot hug him. He is five years old...

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Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Few would disagree that illegal immigration is a problem for the USA and for other Western countries, but it's all too easy to think of it as a statistical problem, not the human problem that it is. At the end of the day Enrique's Journey is not about illegal immigration or people stealing jobs from USA workers, it's about families, and the desperately hard choices that too many have to make... continued

Full Review (306 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .

(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team ).

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Beyond the Book

Quick Facts (from Enrique's Journey )

• About 700,000 immigrants enter the United States illegally each year. In recent years the demographics have changed with many more single mothers arriving.
• Nearly three-quarters of the 48,000 children who migrate alone to "el Norte" through Central America and Mexico each year are in search of a single mother who has left them behind. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the median age of child migrants is 15; the majority are male; some are as young as 7 years.
• In Los Angeles, 82% of live-in nannies and one in four housecleaners are mothers who have at least one child in their home country.
• According to the Center for Immigration Studies, illegal workers donate $6.4 billion ...

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The New York Times

The learning network | text to text | ‘enrique’s journey’ and ‘in trek north, first lure is mexico’s other line’.

Text to Text | ‘Enrique’s Journey’ and ‘In Trek North, First Lure Is Mexico’s Other Line’

Language Arts

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

• See all in Language Arts »
• See all lesson plans »

Last month we introduced our new Text to Text series , which matches Times content with excerpts from often-taught literary, cultural, historical, or scientific material. Read more about the format , and consider submitting an idea.

In the pairing below, we use an excerpt from Sonia Nazario’s “Enrique’s Journey,” a book that has been chosen as a freshman or all-campus read at more than 60 universities.

Ms. Nazario recently wrote an Op-Ed for The Times, “The Heartache of an Immigrant Family,” which educators might decide to pair with this book as well, but we’ve chosen to match it with a Times article and slide show suggested by a New York City teacher, Teresa Devore, who has taught the book in her high school classes.

Background: Here is part of a summary of the book from a related teaching guide :

Enrique is only five years old when his mother leaves her starving family in Honduras and illegally enters the United States in search of a better life. Her plan is to make enough money for Enrique and his sister, Belky, to join her. Opportunities for immigrants like Enrique’s mother are few, however, and she cannot deliver on her promise. Years later, at age sixteen, Enrique is still in Honduras, and his resentment toward his mother is increasing. Yet his urge to see her is so great that he sets out on a dangerous journey through Mexico, across the U.S. border, and eventually to North Carolina.

Ms. Nazario first wrote this story for The Los Angeles Times, where it won two Pulitzer Prizes , one for feature writing and another for photography. She then expanded it into a book, available in English and Spanish, as well as in a young adult version.

We have paired it with a piece from April about Central Americans who, fleeing crime and economic stagnation, are flowing freely across Mexico’s southern border and causing a spike in migration to the United States.

Key Question: What are some of the factors that cause people to risk their lives to leave home and enter the United States illegally, and what can we learn from their stories?

Activity Sheets: As students read and discuss, they might take notes using one or both of the graphic organizers (PDFs) we have created for our Text to Text feature:

• Comparing Two or More Texts
• Double-Entry Chart for Close Reading

Excerpt 1: From “Enrique’s Journey,” by Sonia Nazario

The boy does not understand. His mother is not talking to him. She will not even look at him. Enrique has no hint of what she is going to do. Lourdes knows. She understands, as only a mother can, the terror she is about to inflict, the ache Enrique will feel, and finally the emptiness. What will become of him? Already he will not let anyone else feed or bathe him. He loves her deeply, as only a son can. With Lourdes, he is openly affectionate. “Dame pico, mami. Give me a kiss, Mom,” he pleads, over and over, pursing his lips. With Lourdes, he is a chatterbox. “Mira, mami. Look, Mom,” he says softly, asking her questions about everything he sees. Without her, he is so shy it is crushing. Slowly, she walks out onto the porch. Enrique clings to her pant leg. Beside her, he is tiny. Lourdes loves him so much she cannot bring herself to say a word. She cannot carry his picture. It would melt her resolve. She cannot hug him. He is five years old. They live on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, in Honduras. She can barely afford food for him and his sister, Belky, who is seven. She’s never been able to buy them a toy or a birthday cake. Lourdes, twenty-four, scrubs other people’s laundry in a muddy river. She goes door to door, selling tortillas, used clothes, and plantains. She fills a wooden box with gum and crackers and cigarettes, and she finds a spot where she can squat on a dusty sidewalk next to the downtown Pizza Hut and sell the items to passersby. The sidewalk is Enrique’s playground. They have a bleak future. He and Belky are not likely to finish grade school. Lourdes cannot afford uniforms or pencils. Her husband is gone. A good job is out of the question. Lourdes knows of only one place that offers hope. As a seven-year-old child, delivering tortillas her mother made to wealthy homes, she glimpsed this place on other people’s television screens. The flickering images were a far cry from Lourdes’s childhood home: a two-room shack made of wooden slats, its flimsy tin roof weighted down with rocks, the only bathroom a clump of bushes outside. On television, she saw New York City’s spectacular skyline, Las Vegas’s shimmering lights, Disneyland’s magic castle. Lourdes has decided: She will leave. She will go to the United States and make money and send it home. She will be gone for one year—less, with luck—or she will bring her children to be with her. It is for them she is leaving, she tells herself, but still she feels guilty. She kneels and kisses Belky and hugs her tightly. Then she turns to her own sister. If she watches over Belky, she will get a set of gold fingernails from el Norte. But Lourdes cannot face Enrique. He will remember only one thing that she says to him: “Don’t forget to go to church this afternoon.” It is January 29, 1989. His mother steps off the porch. She walks away. “¿Dónde está mi mami?” Enrique cries, over and over. “Where is my mom?” His mother never returns, and that decides Enrique’s fate.

Read more of this excerpt from “Enrique’s Journey.”

Excerpt 2: From “In Trek North, First Lure Is Mexico’s Other Line,” by Randal C. Archibold, with accompanying photographs by Rodrigo Cruz.

CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico — With her leg snapped and folded excruciatingly over her shoulder, Elvira López Hernández lay flat on a railroad bed as the freight train hurtled above her, clinging tightly to two things: the railroad ties beneath her and the memory of the 4-year-old daughter she had left behind in Guatemala. “I said: ‘My God, I don’t want to die! My daughter!’ ” She slipped off the train in January, one of scores of migrant stowaways heading to the United States. Now she sat at a shelter here, an amputee. But she had no intention of returning to the crime and desperation of Guatemala City; she was still looking north. “What can I do?” she said. In Washington, the biggest immigration overhaul in decades would tighten border security between Mexico and the United States to stem the flow of illegal crossings. But there is another border making the task all the more challenging: Mexico’s porous boundary with Central America, where an increasing number of migrants heading to the United States cross freely into Mexico under the gaze of the Mexican authorities. So many Central Americans are fleeing the violence, crime and economic stagnation of their homes that American officials have encountered a tremendous spike in migrants making their way through Mexico to the United States. American arrests of illegal crossers from countries other than Mexico — mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — more than doubled along the southwest border of the United States last year, to 94,532 from 46,997 in 2011.

For Writing or Discussion

• What do you learn about Lourdes’s love for her son in the opening of “Enrique’s Journey”? What lines or words give you that information? What can you infer about her and her son just from these few paragraphs?
• Read the excerpt and the full article and view all the slide show images. What parallels do you see? What do Lourdes, Enrique, Elvira López Hernández and the people depicted in the slide show seem to have in common? What echoes of specific words or images can you identify between them? How, together, do they confirm or complicate your previous ideas about immigration and immigrants?
• What do the risks these families have taken to come to America tell us about their home countries? About America? What problems do they encounter along their journeys? What issues do their struggles raise? What lessons might they teach?
• According to the excerpts, how do existing immigration policies affect these families? What more do you learn about immigration policy by reading the article and watching the slide show? What questions do these pieces raise?
• What techniques do the writers and the photographer use to help you feel what these immigrants feel? Does putting “faces” on this issue through stories like these change the way you think about immigration and immigration changes? Why or why not?

Going Further

— The video above was produced by high school students from Crawford High in San Diego with a grant from One Book, One San Diego . According to Donald Sinatra , the producer and editor, students were asked to write a movie trailer script for the book, play the characters on screen and direct the short.

Consider creating a short of your own featuring a key scene from this book, or pairing the story of “Enrique’s Journey” with other information you learn from reading more pieces about immigration and customs enforcement .

– Listen to the NPR story, “College Freshmen Learn From ‘Enrique’s Journey.’” Why is this book on so many reading lists for incoming college freshmen? What does it have to teach us about resilience, determination and creating one’s life anew?

Imagine you were leading a seminar on the book for a college orientation. What questions would you ask to help students connect their own lives to the book? Once you’ve drafted a list, hold the seminar in your own classroom. What issues come up? What parallels do students draw between the lives of the people of “Enrique’s Journey” and their own?

— In 2012, we posed the Student Opinion question, “ What are your family stories of sacrifice? ” Answer the question on our blog, or write a more elaborate story of the struggles in your own family background — whether your ancestors fled from political persecution in their home countries or worked long hours so that you could have advantages they never did.

— What are the social implications of immigration in the United States? As a class, make a list of the many issues raised by the article and consider the various policies — education, health care, housing, etc.– affected by immigration.

Create focus groups to address each of these and conduct research into the implications in each area. Use the recent Times series “ Remade in America ,” which covers the stories of recent immigrants and their impact on American institutions. Share your knowledge to increase understanding of how immigration affects American society – for better or worse.

— Recently The Times reported on a study that shows that reading literary fiction makes people more empathetic. The Common Core, however, emphasizes informational text .

How does reading these nonfiction selections make you feel? Do you have a sense of what it would be like to be in Enrique’s or his mother’s shoes? To what extent can well-written reporting and nonfiction also create empathy in readers?

More Resources:

• Educator Resources for “Enrique’s Journey”
• The Learning Network | Learning About U.S. Immigration With The New York Times
• PBS Thematic Teaching | Immigration
• Teaching Tolerance |10 Myths About Immigration and “The Human Face of Immigration”
• Room for Debate | Immigration
• Learning Network Lesson Plan | Pathways to America: Teaching About Immigration Changes”

Common Core English Language Arts Anchor Standards

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.1 Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.


CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.2 Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.4 Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.6 Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.9 Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.10 Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently. 


We have used the excerpt from “Enrique’s Journey” above with permission from Sonia Nazario.

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immigration info

Enrique’s Journey

Sonia nazario, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Sonia Nazario's Enrique’s Journey . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Enrique’s Journey: Introduction

Enrique’s journey: plot summary, enrique’s journey: detailed summary & analysis, enrique’s journey: themes, enrique’s journey: quotes, enrique’s journey: characters, enrique’s journey: symbols, enrique’s journey: theme wheel, brief biography of sonia nazario.

Historical Context of Enrique’s Journey

Other books related to enrique’s journey.

• Full Title: Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother
• When Written: 1997-2006
• Where Written: Honduras, the United States, Mexico
• When Published: 2006
• Genre: Non-fiction
• Setting: Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Chiapas, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Los Angeles, North Carolina, and Florida, United States
• Climax: The book climaxes when Enrique crosses the Rio Grande, enters the United States, and finally reunites with his mother in North Carolina. Because the book is non-fiction, there is not a specific moment that Nazario constructs which can count as the climax. Rather, it is a fast-paced account of the trials of a seventeen-year-old boy in search of his mother.
• Point of View: Nazario

Extra Credit for Enrique’s Journey

The real scoop. Enrique's Journey first appeared in the Los Angeles Times as a six-part series in 2002 with photographs by Don Bartletti.

Double Pulitzer. Both the author, Sonia Nazario, and the photographer, Don Bartletti received Pulitzer Prizes for their work on Enrique's Journey.

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

ENRIQUE'S JOURNEY

The true story of a boy determined to reunite with his mother.

by Sonia Nazario ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2013

Provides a human face, both beautiful and scarred, for the undocumented—a must-read.

2003 Pulitzer Prize–winning author Nazario’s critically acclaimed book Enrique’s Journey , a heart-wrenching account of one young man’s journey to migrate illegally from Honduras to the United States to find the mother who left when he was 5, has been newly adapted for young people.

Nazario’s vividly descriptive narrative recreates the trek that teenage Enrique made from Honduras through Mexico on the tops of freight trains. This adaptation does not gloss over or omit the harrowing dangers—beatings, rape, maiming and murder—faced by migrants coming north from Central America. The material is updated to present current statistics about immigration, legal and illegal, and also addresses recent changes in the economic and political climates of the U.S., Mexico and Honduras, including the increased danger of gang violence related to drug trafficking in Mexico. The book will likely inspire reflection, discussion and debate about illegal immigration among its intended audience. But the facts and figures never overwhelm the human story. The epilogue allows readers who are moved by Enrique to follow the family’s tragedies and triumphs since the book’s original publication; the journey does not end upon reaching the United States.

Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013

ISBN: 978-0385743273

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: July 2, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION

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PERSPECTIVES

INDIVISIBLE

by Daniel Aleman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021

An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.

A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.

Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES

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by Daniel Aleman

THE SUMMER OF BROKEN RULES

by K.L. Walther ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021

Summery fun and games with feeling.

A summer trip helps break 18-year-old Meredith Fox out of a haze of mourning.

Her cousin’s wedding means a return to Martha’s Vineyard, a well-loved destination but one filled with bittersweet memories. It’s been a year and a half since the sudden loss of Meredith’s sister, Claire, and the grief remains strong. Meredith, though, resolves to take this time to celebrate family and bridge the rifts resulting from ghosting friends. She didn’t plan on a meet-cute/embarrassing encounter with the groom’s stepbrother, Wit. Nor did she expect a wedding-week game of Assassin, a water-gun–fueled family tradition. What starts off as a pact of sharing strategic information with Wit grows into something more as the flirting and feelings develop. Only one person can win, though, and any alliance has an expiration date. To win and honor Claire, who was a master of the game, Meredith must keep her eye on the prize. Taking place over the course of a week, the narrative is tight with well-paced reveals that disrupt predictability and keep the plot moving. Early details are picked back up, and many elements come satisfyingly full circle. The short time frame also heightens the tension of this summer romance: What will happen when they leave the bubble of the Vineyard? The mix of budding romance, competitive hijinks, a close-knit circle, as well as dealing with loss make for a satisfying read. The main cast is White.

ISBN: 978-1-72821-029-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021

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How a disillusioned Nigerian man’s trek to Europe becomes a test of faith and ambition

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Book Review

The Road to the Salt Sea

By Samuel Kọ́láwọlé Amistad: 304 pages, $28.99 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Countless Christian songs exalt the ableness of God, but the tune that makes up my childhood soundtrack is the one my mother, a gospel guitarist, would sing when her faith hit the rockiest of shores: “If you’ve tried everything and everything failed …You know God is able … try Jesus.”

Her melodies floated back to me as I read Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel “The Road to the Salt Sea,” which follows the story of Able God, an ambitious Nigerian man disillusioned with his stagnant life. He gets drawn into a crime that sends him into the clutches of a charismatic religious leader promising impoverished Lagos residents better-paying jobs in Italy. As Able God and his fellow migrants embark on this journey, there is a foreboding sense that what lies ahead might be even more treacherous than the realities they’re leaving behind. This harrowing migration story wrestles with themes of family pressure, personal ambition, modern-day slavery, religion and that ever-prevailing Western insistence on positive manifestation — a self-help philosophy that can feel disconnected from the horrors of war and other calamities.

With a close third-person narrator, the book opens like a thriller — with Able God hiding and nursing a wound — before the narrative quickly flashes back to the events leading up to this fateful moment. At 32, the college-educated Able God is not living the life his mother had imagined for him when she bestowed him with such an aspirational name. He’s stuck in a dead-end job at a luxury hotel in Lagos, where the glass walls, gleaming chandeliers and vast lobby stand in stark contrast to his one-room apartment devoid of electricity.

A deeply religious woman who weaves her Yoruba traditions and Christian faith, Able God’s mother rebukes him: “Do you want to serve others for the rest of your life?”

While he has long strayed from his religious upbringing, Able God is just as idealistic as his mother; he’s simply bound to another form of faith: self-help books whose affirmational phrases he repeats like proverbs.

Determined to “think” his way into manifesting the life he fantasizes about (world-renowned chess player or wealthy business magnate), every day he flashes his “hundred-watt toothpaste-commercial” smile at hotel guests, affluent people he believes could help catapult him into a better future. But Able God also resents the way some of the travelers treat hotel workers and other working-class Lagos residents. “How had he acquired his wealth?” Able God wonders about a guest named Dr. Badero. “He was sure he’d built his wealth on the blood, sweat and toil of the powerless.”

Able God and his co-workers witness all manner of outlandish behavior from privileged guests, but when Dr. Badero turns violent against a sex worker who lives in Able God’s neighborhood, Able God cannot turn a blind eye. “He had known men like Dr. Badero all his life, men who dominated women — and who hurt them. Men who thought sexual conquest was a God-given right.” Such an assessment could be lifted from these fictional pages and plopped into recent news recounting the actions of powerful men.

Obsessed with saving the woman he believes is in danger, Able God becomes embroiled in a crime from which no affirmations or prayer can rescue him. A religious leader hawking the migration to Italy promises the trip is “free” and can be paid later with their jobs. This snake-oil salesman’s name is Ben Ten (after the namesake TV series’ cartoon character with the capacity to morph into different aliens).

As he endures an increasingly difficult trip, Able God leans on self-help mantras the more he senses his control over his destiny slipping away. “Enjoy the journey on the way to your destination,” he recalls. Yet not only is this journey not enjoyable — it threatens the lives of the migrants as they cross border checkpoints stocked with corrupt soldiers, trudge through the unforgiving Sahara, face starvation and thirst and enter a part of Libya still reeling from civil war. “We are close to the Promised Land,” Ben Ten tells them after weeks of traveling, but following his announcement comes a dramatic turning point that plummets the migrants into human trafficking, slavery and even graver violence.

In his essay collection, “How to Write About Africa,” the late Kenyan author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina wrote satirically about journalists and authors who treat one of the world’s most diverse continents as though it were a monolith. “Treat Africa as if it were one country,” he advised, tongue-in-cheek. “It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. … Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions.”

In “The Road to the Salt Sea,” you’ll find starvation, power dynamics inherent in class systems, the aftereffects of war, but the novel is proof that when a writer dares to broach such themes, stereotypes can be dismantled through specificity, through painting characters as full beings. With his attention to detail and rich crafting of an interior life for Able God, Kọ́láwọlé offers us a masterclass in sensory writing (engaging the five senses in ways that repulse and delight). He subtly weaves history into his narrative and balances his main character’s inner life with the chaos of the external world. “These children lacked guardians and lived in poverty, but they also had freedom.”

In an interview with the Hopkins Review, Kọ́láwọlé, who was born and raised in Ibadan, about 80 miles north of Lagos, says his greatest wish is for his writing “to touch the heart of my reader.” In “The Road to the Salt Sea,” he grabs us by the throat, gut and heart. At times, the suspense is all-engrossing; at other times, one wrenching scene after another overwhelms. Yet the novel reminds us that even in calamitous times, the search for meaning and purpose continues, despite the ways in which mantras might fall short, biblical messages might confound and false prophets and preachers peddle desperate and vulnerable people.

During a stop in Niger, Able God wanders upon a place of worship “reduced to ashes” in what he believes was the result of religious riots. “Could God inhabit something so charred and dilapidated?” he wonders. Able God is no saint, but his fight for physical survival, and even his ability to hold on to a shard of optimism in the face of atrocities, is testament to the tenacity of the human spirit.

Cassandra Lane is author of a memoir, “We Are Bridges,” editor-in-chief of L.A. Parent and a contributor to the anthology “Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California.”

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Tomi Adeyemi’s Books Are Fantasy. What They Taught Her Is Painfully Real.

With her new book, “Children of Anguish and Anarchy,” Adeyemi is wrapping up her best-selling Legacy of Orïsha series. The journey hasn’t been easy.

Credit... Dana Scruggs for The New York Times

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By Wilson Wong

• June 24, 2024

Something was in the air — though Tomi Adeyemi couldn’t quite say what. It wasn’t the sweltering heat of a New York City summer, nor the perfume of the sweat that had gathered atop our skin.

“What’s your sign?” Adeyemi immediately asked me, before we even began to talk about her new book.

Aquarius, I confessed.

“Stop!” she responded. “I’m just having my own moment because you are the third Aquarius sun I have met in the past 36 hours.” Later, she learns our zodiac signs are flipped: I’m an Aquarius sun and Leo moon; she’s a Leo sun and Aquarius moon. Air and fire, fire and air.

Drama, divination, nature’s elements — all words that could easily be applied to Adeyemi’s best-selling Legacy of Orïsha series, whose third and final book, “Children of Anguish and Anarchy,” will be published on Tuesday by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers.

The series follows a young girl named Zélie who is born of magical heritage in the kingdom of Orïsha. When the series opened, Zélie and her people, the maji, had been subjugated by Orïsha’s non-magical monarchy, which stripped them of their powers, abused them and did all it could to make sure they never returned to their former glory. Over the course of the first two books, “Children of Blood and Bone” and “Children of Virtue and Vengeance,” Zélie restores magic to the maji, and in the process accidentally gives it to the monarchy too, resulting in an all-out war between them.

“Children of Anguish and Anarchy” picks up after the battle. There is a victor, yes, but it’s neither the monarchy nor the maji. Turns out King Baldyr, the leader of a foreign faction called the Skulls whose wicked aspirations for world conquest echo those of trans-Atlantic slave traders, has landed in Orïsha. He’s captured Zélie, imprisoned her on his ship and trafficked her across the seas in hopes of harnessing her magic to colonize the land. Can Zélie save herself and her people before the Skulls wipe them out entirely? Or is she too late?

Ahead of the book’s release, Adeyemi spoke to the Book Review about the inspirations behind her young adult fantasy trilogy, how the West African-influenced series has changed since its debut in 2018 and what readers can expect in this last volume.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Tell me about your inspiration behind the world of Orïsha.

It’s threefold. First, I was fresh out of college. I had a travel grant. I go to Brazil, go to Salvador, go to this museum and it’s closed for renovations. It was raining and I ended up in a gift shop and see these four ceramic plates: There was this beautiful dark-skinned goddess, faceless and in red; there was this goddess commanding the seas — again, brown skin; this powerful man commanding fire; and this other man with a green background and an arrow. And I had never even considered that there could be African gods and goddesses. It never crossed my mind. And so, it was literally like an explosion in the world of Orïsha. Not the characters, those came eight months later, but that world came fully formed. I saw the lions, I saw the magic, I saw the temples, I saw the battle.

Second was me realizing that I needed to make a serious attempt at making a living as a writer.

And third was my heart. I think I’d characterize it as emotional PTSD. It started with Trayvon Martin . It continued with “The Hunger Games,” with the backlash against all the Black characters ; the South Carolina Bible study shooting ; Philando Castile ; Alton Sterling ; Sandra Bland — all of these are emotional core memories because when it was a man, that was my dad. When it was Sandra, that was my mom. I say it’s emotional PTSD because it hadn’t happened to me, but it was the reverberations of everything I was seeing. I had something that was so heavy on my heart; I needed to get that out and I needed to work through that.

It’s been almost five years since your second book, “Children of Virtue and Vengeance,” was published. How did writing “Children of Anguish and Anarchy” compare with the others?

My books are kind of like Taylor Swift novels, because they’re whatever I’m going through or whatever I just went through. So Book 2 wasn’t about the emotional PTSD I felt I had from years of living with police brutality front and center on my screen; it was about the emotional turmoil I was in at that time in my life.

Book 3 is very similar. This is something my readers know, but I got really sick between the publication of Book 2 and the publication of Book 3. I got really, really, really sick. It took five years: I was sick for about three of those years, and I was healing and recovering for about two of those years.

What happened?

There’s a lot of reasons for it. I think it was the stress of Book 1 and Book 2, and the person I’ve always been: Type A! Achieve! Go, do this!

But it’s a lot, you know? You see those viral videos of, like, Miley Cyrus reading her schedule as a 14-year-old girl, and I’ll talk to my producers and they’ll be like, “You actually did have a very Disney-Channel-star experience.” You take all of that, you take the age and you take the belief that the story was more important to me.

It’s hard because I wouldn’t change this or that, but I also look at this as the journey that you go through. There’s this greater divine timing to how these stories are coming out, and with this third book, I have people who have been on this journey with me, and there’s such a joyful celebration.

What do you hope readers take away from this final book?

I want them to feel loved. I don’t want to say I’m grateful for the journey it took to get me to this point, but I like that I can stand in front of readers and say, “Hey, we know life’s going to knock us down. That’s life. Life is going to life.”

Whether you need to take inspiration from Zélie and her story and how she got knocked down and got back up and ultimately becomes what she becomes through the journey of this book, or, my story of the past five years where I was so sick I couldn’t even write or speak and then to come back and be like, “Oh my gosh. Look at what you did!”

If you need a fictional hero, I got you. If you need someone who’s got her own scars and wounds — but with long hair, still fabulous — I got you.

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Tomi Adeyemi Interview:  With her new book, “Children of Anguish and Anarchy,” Adeyemi is wrapping up her best-selling Legacy of Orïsha series. The journey hasn’t been easy .

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