Emily May's Reviews > Infinite Country

“Leaving is a kind of death. You may find yourself with much lesss than you had before.”

I've been struggling to get into a few different books lately, starting them and then quickly stopping when they didn't grab me. To avoid a book slump, I sought out a little book with short chapters. Infinite Country fit perfectly into that description, and it just so happens that it also packed an extremely powerful punch.

I zipped through this, getting caught up in all the characters' stories. It alternates between the present, where Talia has escaped from a girls' correctional facility, and the past, where Talia's parents emigrate to the United States and struggle to create a better life for themselves and stay under the radar to avoid deportation.

There was a very quiet sadness to this tale. Engel has that lovely understated writing style where she doesn't spend pages telling you how to feel, but instead just shows you what happens without fuss or fanfare. Believe me, it's enough. I felt distraught at parts of this novel. Not just because families are torn apart, but at the way they get back up, keep working, keep fighting the system, to hopefully, one day, get back to one another.

Engel explains the pain at the heart of emigrating. To feel ties to a country that is your home, that your family have walked upon for generations, but to break those ties and seek out a better life for yourself and your children, only to wonder when you've done so-- are you really better off? Life is often full of "what ifs" but "what if I'd never left?" is an especially haunting one.

Warning for on-page rape.