Curated by KEI LIM

This month, JULIET MCSHANNON, RO SKELTON, and TERESE SVOBODA review books that center personal and political hardships. They carefully consider the responsibility and care of writing about real people, the act of research in representation, and how writing can function as an agent of change.

Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, recommended by Issue 31 contributor Juliet McShannon

I grew up in Apartheid South Africa and witnessed its transition to democracy. I now live near the California-Mexico border. These two charged environments may be culturally and geographically disparate, but their socio-political milieus mirror each other in many ways. I am drawn to narratives that are not afraid to sit in the “gray” and examine the issues from different angles. The Devil’s Highway: A True Story is such a book. Louis Alberto Urrea provides a new way of thinking about the border crisis, and we are led to a deeper understanding of the issues that transcends geo-politics and ideological differences.

The story follows the ill-fated journey of 26 Mexicans who attempted to cross the border through a treacherous section of the Arizona desert known as the Devil’s Highway. This could easily have become a story of caricatures: good undocumented immigrants versus evil Border Patrol agents. Instead, Urrea zooms in and out of the harrowing journey to present us with different viewpoints that tempers our judgement and guides us to a “bigger picture” understanding of the crisis. We come to see the confluence of desperation, misrepresentation, and political absurdities on both sides of the border. The 26 “walkers” who drive the narrative are emblematic of the thousands of unnamed, unseen undocumented immigrants who remain a shadowy presence on our societal psyche, and onto whom we are apt to project our fears and prejudices.

The prose is vivid and evocative, with unapologetic, heart-stopping sentences that I want to etch on my writer desk. We come to learn and care about the walkers. We root for them. We watch events unfold with horror. We are surprised by the kindnesses from unexpected quarters, and we are reminded of our tenuous grip on our humanity. Specific to a time and place (and yet timeless, and timely) this book is impossible to read without considering, if not re-evaluating, our own attitudes toward alterity.

Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, recommended by Issue 31 contributor Ro Skelton

When Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning novel The God of Small Things was published in 1997, I was an eighteen-year-old reader-writer from a farm in the south of England, thrown into an abrupt adulthood in London. I worked double-shifts in a bar and wrote in the early mornings before work, trying to make sense of my place in the world. The novel propelled me into a sense that the world was large and strange, and that I was not so strange within it.

When I read Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me earlier this year, twenty-nine years later, I had a young child and a wife, and I was a writer and so was my wife. My life––as it had always quietly been––was writing and reading, and my friends were writers whom I’d often never even met. And this is how Mother Mary feels—like entering a deep friendship with a writer who shares, over the course of the story of her life, what it was like for her to be somewhat lost and searching, making meaning in her life in the shadow of her loving and often abusive mother.

Roy does a rare thing, which is to write of her often-brutal past––neglectful parents, lost loves, homelessness, displacement, and hunger––with a kindness to herself and to her experiences, and with a generosity to those who brought her some of those hardships. Particularly touching is the love and humor with which she describes meeting her absent father—a down-and-out addict who cannot seem to come to terms with the depth of his issues and so is cared for by his children. Roy’s writing beautifully explores the meaning of such experiences, for her life and for her life’s work.

It is hard to write about family dysfunction––the people and experiences that have shaped us in ways we would not choose to shape our own children. What a strength to do it with humor and kindness, and a gift to the reader to receive it. When I sat down to pick a passage to use for a writing class I was leading, I found myself reading again from the beginning—so I am halfway through my second reading of it, quite by accident, unable to stop. And it is just as beautiful the second time around.

Jimmy Donnell’s The Soldier’s House, recommended by Issue 29 contributor Terese Svoboda

In The Soldier’s House, Jimmy Donnell, a dazed PTSD-suffering vet, takes in the family of his dead Iraqi translator, including Tariq, the translator’s child, who is legless as a result of the war. Donnell does his best to welcome them to the US despite their anger and unresolved grief over the translator’s death, the child’s disability, and their subsequent displacement. Is forgiveness possible? “I knew… like all refugees, I would be plagued by loss, homesickness, and sorrow,” says Tariq’s mother. The family settles into one end of his house and tries to piece together a new life.

The Soldier’s House represents a culmination of Benedict’s work in a Goya-esque triptych of books about the disasters of war and its long reach, which includes Sand Queen, a kind of This is The Things They Carried for women, in which a female soldier in Iraq struggles to survive alongside a female Iraqi medical student; and Wolf Season, about an Iraq war veteran who keeps wolves while raising a daughter, a widowed Iraqi doctor who has emigrated with her son, and a Marine wife who fears her husband’s return from Afghanistan. Characters reoccur throughout the triptych, and all of them seem so fully realized you can’t believe that Benedict has not lived through the events as described. But what she’s done is perhaps more exemplary: she’s chosen to interview those who have suffered from war’s effects, rather than report directly on the wars themselves. This has been her modus operandi for several recent books: The Good Deed, finalist for the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, resulted from extensive interviewing of African refugees in Greece; and The Lonely Soldier, winner of the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, was written about sexual harassment in the armed forces, after talking to hundreds of female soldiers. Extensive research from The Lonely Soldier informs the entire triptych.

Benedicts’ compassion for her subjects and concern for the suffering of those caught in the crossfire of war foregrounds all of her work. “I’m glad America doesn’t have bombs,” says Tariq on finding out Jimmy Donnell is one of the good GIs. But ICE now freely bombards protesters with tear gas and shoots them point-blank. Benedict’s time, alas, is now, and we should be thankful we have a writer willing to elucidate the humanity underlying these terrifying topics with such grace and force.