Pay Dirt

When Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, about a mother and son’s perilous odyssey from cartel-ravaged Mexico to the United States, was named an Oprah’s Book Club selection, Cummins must have felt bulletproof. Not only had she gotten a seven-figure advance and a film deal, but her book had also received rapturous blurbs from Stephen King, John Grisham, Sandra Cisneros, and Julia Alvarez. Now her book's jacket would sport, like a gleaming sheriff’s badge, the golden “O.”