Reading Group GuideĪfter years of taking care of her mother, Juana Garcia leaves her small town in Mexico to find her father who disappeared nineteen years earlier.
In Across a Hundred Mountains, Reyna Grande puts a human face on the controversial issue of immigration, helping readers to better understand “the desperation of illegal immigrants and the families they leave behind” ( Entertainment Weekly) in pursuit of a better life. Finding themselves-in a Tijuana jail-in desperate circumstances, they offer each other much needed material and spiritual support and ultimately become linked forever in the most unexpected of ways. Out of money and in need of someone to help her across the border, Juana meets Adelina Vasquez, a young woman who left her family in California to follow her lover to Mexico. (Oct.Winner of the American Book Award, Across a Hundred Mountains is a “timely and riveting” ( People) novel about a young girl who leaves her small town in Mexico to find her father, who left his family to work in America-a story of migration, loss, and discovery.Īfter a tragedy separates her from her mother, Juana García leaves in search of her father, who left them two years earlier. This uplifting story of fortitude and resilience looks deeply into the complexities of immigration and one woman’s struggle to adapt and thrive in America. After winning a PEN fellowship, marrying, and publishing her first novel, Grande discovered that writing her story could help her make sense of her troubled past and gain the courage to create a stable life for herself and her new family. Grande explores the complicated relationships of her uprooted family, dissecting a history of abuse (her grandmother verbally and physically abused her mother, who in turned abused Grande and her siblings) and vowing to break the cycle. She worked hard in school, graduated with honors from college, and landed a teaching job in L.A. to help her and two older siblings get to L.A. Grande then recounts her difficult childhood: her parents divorced and left her with her grandmother in Mexico at age nine, after two failed attempts, Grande made it across the border with the aid of her father, who returned from the U.S. The memoir opens with Grande leaving Los Angeles to attend UC Santa Cruz at age 21, on her way to becoming the first in her family to earn a college degree her parents, both naturalized citizens, were not educated beyond elementary school. Novelist Grande ( The Distance Between Us) writes with strength and passion of her life’s journey-from her birth in a shack in the poverty-stricken Mexican town of Iguala, to success as an author in the U.S.
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