When You Get to the Other Side

A spellbinding novel about crossing both natural and supernatural borders--the mystical beauty of Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima meets the urgency of Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archives.

The morning they left Amatlán in the bed of a pickup truck, in the hours between darkness and daybreak, the world became immense and noisy. Emilia Ventura shut her eyes and inhaled deeply, bringing in the fresh air of her homeland. She wanted to hold onto it. Let it go down into the depths of her soul, wrapped securely in the mist of daybreak.

Twelve-year-old Emilia and fifteen-year-old Gregorio spend their childhood following their tenacious grandmother, Mamá Lochi, through the oak- and jocote-filled mountains of Amatlán, México--gathering herbs for the folk remedies Mamá Lochi makes, listening to her awe-inspiring stories about becoming a curandera, and learning how to connect with the supernatural world themselves. But, when she passes away they're left alone, with their father hundreds of miles north in the U.S. So they scrape together all their money, and pay coyotes to smuggle them to the other side.

The siblings are exhausted and famished before they even make it to the border, and they fall into only more danger after crossing. After the predatory coyotes separate Emilia from Gregorio--having their own plans for the young girl--the siblings struggle through the parching desert, and a human trafficking operation hidden within it, to make their way back to each other. They draw strength from their profound bond as well as the supernatural abilities their grandmother helped them hone, such as catching glimpses of the future and hiding to the point of invisibility. Their efforts are interwoven with flashbacks to Mamá Lochi herself, whose tales of the mystical journey she took to become a curandera teaches the siblings how insubstantial and blurred the imagined borders between past and future, self and other, and life and death truly are--preparing them, as much as anything could, to experience all these spaces on their own journey.

This masterful novel, first published in México, pushes beyond stereotypes to honor not only the dangers immigrants withstand, but also the far-reaching knowledge and roots they carry. When You Get to the Other Side is a powerful, poignant look at the nature of borders, what it means to cross them, and the changes people undergo when they travel between two worlds.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Published: 09/13/2022
ISBN: 9781947627611
Pages: 304

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2022