Well this was just a delight. It was such a delight that I was reading it, I wanted to propose it for podcast. We are supposed to propose books for podcast that we haven’t actually read yet, so I was considering perpetrating a teeny, tiny fraud* on Whiskey Jenny. But the book was such a delight, and we were stuck in a car in Agra because some VIP’s visit to the Taj Mahal had shut down the roads our driver needed to use to get us to Jaipur, that I could not resist reporting bits of it to her as I was reading.
Here is the elevator pitch, and I think you will find it hard to resist: After watching the film The Magnificent Seven, nineteen-year-old Nayeli conceives a plan to travel up to the United States with her three friends and bring back some men to protect her home village of Tres Camarones, all but empty of men and left at the mercy of any gangsters who might be passing through.
Already so charming, right? Just the premise? But Into the Beautiful North really won me not with its charming premise, but with its light heart. The experience of reading it reminded me of nothing so much as Where’d You Go, Bernadette, another book throughout which I was braced for flurries of catastrophic unkindnesses that never showed. That isn’t to say that Nayeli and her friends endure no setbacks and no hardships; but hardship is not the story Urrea is telling. The story he’s telling is about friendship and hope.
I’ve made a few forays into the brave new world of the YALSA Alex Awards, having heard about them from the marvelous Margaret H. Willison, and Into the Beautiful North has been the big winner so far. I approached this book with a fearful expectation of having my heart broken on behalf of Nayeli and her friends, and instead it gave me the metaphorical equivalent of a hug and a mug full of hot chocolate.
*Not really. I could not bring myself to perpetrate even the teeniest, tiniest fraud on Whiskey Jenny, who is so radiantly honest herself that the George Washington cherry tree story probably derived from her childhood.