The Human Heart of Immigration
by Lucy S
Ignacio is a boy with two mothers and two names. He is “Nacho,” to his birth mother, Soli, and “Iggy” to his foster mother, Kavya. In her touching and timely new novel, Lucky Boy, Shanthi Sekaran tells the story of Ignacio’s two mothers; one, an 18 year-old undocumented immigrant who arrives in this country only to discover she is pregnant, and the other, a young married woman of Indian-American descent, wanting very much, but struggling, to have a child of her own. These parallel plot lines underscore the strong desire that comes with wanting motherhood and the deep sadness that comes with losing it. Sekaran does an admirable job at presenting both viewpoints of this story without legitimizing one over the other. She tells her tale with humor and compassion and we know Ignacio is loved by many, but we are never told which mother is best for him. Ignacio is a “lucky boy” because of all this love, but also a boy in a complicated situation made more tangled by love.
The true-to-life and somewhat flawed characters keep us from aligning too closely with either mother and Sekaran does not try to mollify us by showing one side in a more favorable light. What she does highlight is the deep complexity of immigrant situations and the question of what it means to be an American and to enjoy the privileges that this country has to offer, or suffer from a lack of advantages.
Read-alikes: The Book of Unknown Americans by Christina Henriquez or The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle
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