The New American

Starred review from March 30, 2020
In Marcom’s powerful, heartbreaking latest (after The Brick House), an undocumented college student makes the long odyssey back to California from Guatemala after being deported. Emilio Matias, 21, is a UC Berkeley student in 2012 when he gets in a car accident. After he is unable to produce a valid ID, the police turn him over to ICE, who jail him for months before sending him to his aunt’s house in Todos Santos, Guatemala. Desperate to return to his home, his studies, his family, and his girlfriend in California, Emilio embarks on a violent and treacherous trip hopping freight trains with four other migrants. Along the way, members of their group become victims of thieves, rapists, and sadistic police, and must contend with unreliable smugglers. There are also safe houses and villagers who provide food, water, clothing, and medical care, and generous fellow migrants. Marcom’s prose is steady and soulful, particularly during the graphic, harrowing account of an excruciating Sonora Desert crossing, and the narrative is deepened by a series of lyrical interludes describing dangerous journeys of unnamed refugees (“they and all of our stories are dark phenomena of this dark earth,” one reflects). Marcom’s remarkable tale credibly captures the desperation and despair of those who undertake the dangerous trek north.

March 15, 2020
Emilio desperately wants to go home so he won't miss out on too much of the semester at UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, he is a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status youth who has been deported to his birth country of Guatemala. Award-winning Marcom's (The Brick House, 2017) latest is a poetic nightmarescape that hums with foreboding and the anguish of lost innocence. As Emilio heads back north, he and the stalwart companions he finds along the way?each with their own compelling reason for making the deadly trek?progress through a gauntlet of violence, hunger, and danger from all sides, they are graced with love and compassion in the most unlikely ways: the gift of an orange from a child, shelter from a terrified couple, and a bag of sweaters from an old man. Told mostly from Emilio's point of view, though peppered with scenes from others' lives, each section is also embroidered with Emilio's dreams. Marcom masterfully navigates the graphic ugliness of deportation and anguished immigration with entreaties to a remote and capricious God, creating a tough but necessary and beautiful novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2020
Emilio, a "dreamer" and U.C. Berkeley student who has been deported to Guatemala, a country foreign to him, tries to return to the Bay Area home where he was raised. Emilio's mother, in Northern California, wants her son to stay put with a relative in rural Guatemala while an immigration attorney in the United States works on his case. But Emilio is young, bright, and afraid--that his life will pass him by waiting for the U.S. to get its immigration-policy act together and that he'll never see his mother, two sisters, and girlfriend again. He embarks on the perilous journey back to California secretly, hoping he can make most of the trip before having to call his mother for help. Along the way, he befriends four Hondurans--Mathilde, Jonatan, Pedro, and William--and together they cross into Mexico, ride atop The Beast, the infamous freight train that travels north, and traverse the Sonoran Desert to cross the U.S.'s southern border. Marcom has crafted a harrowing, heartbreaking story. Emilio and his friends experience extreme violence and terror as well as deep wells of courage, resilience, and hope. The author explores the many ways people preserve their dignity in circumstances in which others with more power would reduce them to animals. While people do monstrous things, no one here is all monster. For every cartel henchman who abuses the migrants, there is a volunteer who offers them food, water, clothing, shelter, or words of comfort. Marcom's plotting and pacing are well honed, and her prose is often revelatory, but a romance between Emilio and Mathilde feels jarring in its insistence on their inexhaustible nobility. Likewise, stories from other migrants riding the train, though well-told, feel like reportage conspicuously dropped into the story. The author's effort to "humanize" Emilio the Dreamer and the other Central American migrants raises questions about whom this novel is for and what it's assuming about whose voices will be heard on migration. A gripping novel to read alongside the work of contemporary Latinx writers.

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Starred review from July 1, 2020

In her debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, Marcom explored the traumatic aftermath of the Armenian genocide through the imagined thoughts and feelings of those left behind. Here, she pens a poetic reflection on deportation, immigration, and the abstract notion of home. The story follows Emilio, a young Guatemalan American college student who is deported and must make his way back to his family in California. Written in the third person, the narrative unfolds through Emilio's inner thoughts as he moves with bands of immigrants across the landscape of Mexico. Enduring the endless brutality of the terrain, as well as a recurring cycle of violence at multiple stops along the journey, Emilio finds solidarity with his fellow travelers and begins to dissociate from his long-understood identity as an American. Interwoven into each section of the narrative are his memories of the past and his dreams for the future, which slowly evolve into the singular present. VERDICT Marcom has penned a lyrical mediation on being and becoming, identity and anonymity, and the ambiguity of place. [See Prepub Alert, 11/4/19.]--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2019

Told by his parents that he can't get a driver's license, Guatemalan American Emilio is shocked by their reason; he is undocumented. He continues his studies at Berkeley, but after a minor car accident, he is deported--and immediately starts planning his return. Marcom, a Saudi Arabian-born Whiting and PEN/USA honoree, founded the New American Story Project, a digital oral history focused on unaccompanied Central American minors in America. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.