Robert Mailer Anderson

Received this an as an ARC...A Graphic depiction of an immigrant from Mexico searching for his father after the 9/11 tragedy. This would be good read for juniors and seniors, it’s a little too mature for students younger. I liked how it was drawn in black and white, stressing the sadness and depression of that time period. There were times as I was reading the panels, that I got a little bit lost with the story. I would have to go back and re-read in order to understand what was going on. This disrupted the flow of the story. Otherwise a solid story of learning how to move on and realize what is important in life while trying to survive in a new country.… (mere)

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a young man named Fernando Reynoso from Mazatlan, Mexico, goes to New York City to seek information about his missing father, an undocumented immigrant who worked in the Windows of the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center. As Fernando pays to have himself smuggled across the border, I started to flash back to American Dirt and the controversy surrounding that regarding authentic voices as I am unsure that any of the creators of this graphic novel are actually Hispanic. I tried to verify with a few Google searches, but found nothing conclusive, just that Robert Mailer Anderson seems to be married to a Silicon Valley heiress and is quite well off now despite a childhood spent in poverty.

Setting that aside, I next found myself distracted by several of the drawn characters seeming to be based on real life actors like Luis Guzman and Edward James Olmos. Only after finishing did I notice the "Now a major motion picture" blurb on the cover. (It's true! I just grab books off the shelf and start reading without looking closely at the front or back covers for fear of spoilers.) But in searching the book's creators, I found out that this graphic novel is actually an adaptation of the screenplay for the film instead of being the source of the film. So apparently it was drawn using the images of the people they intended to cast. (Guzman's part seems to be played by a younger guy in the trailer, a castmate of Olmos' on Mayans M.C.) The movie was scheduled to be released during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but has since ended up on a Spanish language streaming service called VIX. Okay.

At this point I feel like I spent more time researching the book afterward than I did reading it.

And how did I actually like it? Well, it was kind of blah, with its slow pacing and cliched writing: our hero ends up in NYC meeting some stock colorful characters and a young woman for a perfunctory romance. Eventually, he discovers some secrets about his father that change everything, and I have to wonder if one of those secrets might be upsetting to people who actually lost loved ones on 9/11, because dad ain't dead, he's just using a real tragedy to pull a bratty hoax..

I may watch the movie sometime, now that I know it exists, just to see if Olmos can give the slight story some heft. But I'm worried because Fernando is played by Ryan Guzman, who I watch on CBS' 9-1-1, where I find his acting to be quite wooden.… (mere)