Sparse and affecting, this novel follows one Colombian family from the earliest days of the parents’ relationship on through two decades of life. Through fateful yet ordinary decisions, the family is fractured between their native Bogotá and the U.S. Talia, the youngest daughter, lives in Colombia with her father while her mother and two siblings carry on life in New Jersey. The story is rich with ambient language and poignant observations. In just under two hundred pages, Engel encapsulates the human toll of a bordered world and the tensions inherent in loving across distance. 

There is a moment about two-thirds of the way through that brought together for me the entire story up until that point. I was struck by the way Engel crafted the story to be both coherent and disparate, descriptive yet lean. It was as though the book’s style reflected the family’s situation. Masterfully, the novel balances heartbreaking circumstance with remarkable resilience in a way that does not reduce any character to an inspirational story. They are fiercely loyal to one another and so they press on, simply because they must. 

I am not a Central American immigrant, so I cannot speak to that specific experience. However, I can tell you that based on my volunteer work that the experiences with the US immigration system outlined in this story are in no way far-fetched. If you find yourself reading and thinking it’s dramatized or unlikely, I challenge you to interrogate those assumptions.