Quotes from Jeanine Cummins

That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

Lydia is dubious at first, but if you can't trust a librarian, who can you trust?

From now on, when we board, each time we board, I will remind you to be terrified,' she says. 'And you remind me, too: this is not normal.' 'This is not normal.' Soledad nods.

Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn't know if she's the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled.

So Lydia is worried about all these things, and yet, she has a new understanding about the futility of worry. The worst will either happen or not happen, and there's no worry that will make a difference in either direction. Don't think.

The brothers are a deeply calming presence. They are warm bread. They are shelter.

He wants to plead not guilty by reason of grief. She knows grief is a kind of insanity. She knows.

For all her love of words, at times they're entirely insufficient.

she was a book lover who enjoyed reading aloud to her baby. She liked the idea that, even before he understood them, he might begin with the most beautiful words, that he'd build language from a foundation of literature and poetry.

He's never been close to a tragedy that barbaric, never experienced a shock so primitive that it shakes him to the very core of his beliefs. In short, Nicolás has never had a fundamental change of heart. So he's unaware of the way Newton's third law can resonate in a place like this: for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption.

Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he's reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off?

There's a blessing in the moments after terror and before confirmation.

When she thinks of this, she feels as tatty as a scrap of lace, defined not so much by what she's made of, but more by the shapes of what's missing.

She'd hoped, like one of those desert rattlesnakes, to shed the skin of her anguish and leave it behind her in the Mexican dirt.

Despite everything, he likes being alive. Lydia doesn't know whether that's true for herself. For mothers, the question is immaterial anyway. Her survival is a matter of instinct rather than desire.

Someone once told me that the only good advice for grief is to stay hydrated. Because everything else is just chingaderas.

Lydia has a growing sense that her very humanity is under siege,

I only meant because sometimes the experience of reading can be corrupted by too many opinions.

He seemed enlightened. But like every drug lord who's ever risen to such a rank, he was also shrewd, merciless, and ultimately delusional. He was a vicious mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman. A thug who fancied himself a poet.

I'm grateful to the following writers, whose work you should read if you want to learn more about Mexico and the realities of compulsory migration: Luis Alberto Urrea, Óscar Martínez, Sonia Nazario, Jennifer Clement, Aída Silva Hernández, Rafael Alarcón, Valeria Luiselli, and Reyna Grande.

She doesn't have the reservoir of space to take anything else into her brain.

for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption. In any

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

Less than two weeks ago, dirt on the floor in her hallway was a thing that could annoy her. It's unimaginable. The reality of what happened is so much worse than the very worst of her imaginary fears had ever been. But it could be worse still.