Book Review

Enrique’s Journey

Enrique’s Journey. The long story of a boy who’s mother goes to the United States, and the things that happen to him as he tries to get to her and become a person who can survive the harsh cruelties of reality that so many people have to face everyday just to make sure they can scrounge together a pathetic dinner.
This is the book my group read for our Literature Circle. I personally thought it was a very emotional, interesting book, and definitely the most exciting non-fiction book I’ve ever read. It begins when Lourdes (Enrique’s mother) leaves for the United States so she can somehow get together enough money for Enrique and Belky (Enrique’s sister) to manage to survive, knowing that if she stays in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, They all might starve. Luckily she pulls enough together enough for Enrique and Belky to go to school. However, trouble with Enrique’s family does not end there. In fact, more trouble begins with Enrique himself. He begins to be upset that his mother is never there and starts acting atrociously at both school and home. Finally his Grandmother gets tired of his bad behavior and sends him to his father, who then sends him away to start a new family. Enrique cycles from relative to relative until he feels like a total reject. Because of this, he tries to ease his pain by taking drugs. But while they ease his pain, it only creates more, for he goes deep into debt because of the drugs and begins to steal from his relatives to pay off his enormous drug debt. However, he’s caught and his relatives kick him out of the house. He decides there is only one person left in the world for him and only one place he can go to get away from drugs. His mother in the United States. The next day, he says goodbye to his grandmother and girlfriend and sets off the extremely long, dangerous and eventful journey that will eventually bring him to be with his mother once more.
This was an interesting book because while it was surprisingly gripping, it was true, which made it all the more exciting to read. Before I read this book, I quite honestly thought I would never read a non-fiction book that would gain so much of my attention that I just couldn’t put it down. But Enrique’s Journey proved that hypothesis to be very, very wrong.
I believe that it owes a large part of this to the fact that it didn’t just center around Enrique, but you heard the stories of many other people, and the book took on a life of its own and came to be about migrants and immigration in general, including the risks and the most common reasons so many people try to do it year after year. I think it also owes part of its greatness to the fact that it never took too much time on one part of the story. It kept the story going and flowed very nicely.
But whatever it was, the characters, the plot, the flow or the whole book in general, I think Enrique’s Journey is a success that people who are looking for a good book to read should pick out as soon as possible.