But like Frank McCourt’s book, hers is a story of children crossing borders with an alcoholic father at its center. Her prose is often more expository than lyrical, and the translated dialogue can sound stilted. Grande, the author of two previous novels, doesn’t always reach for the artistic heights of that bestselling memoir of an Irish American family. “The Distance Between Us” is instead something akin to being the “Angela’s Ashes” of the modern Mexican immigrant experience. Grande relentlessly mines this thematically rich terrain in “The Distance Between Us.” With two deeply flawed adults at its center - her embittered father and her less-than-reliable mother - it’s a brutally honest book that avoids the sentimentality that permeates many Latino immigrant narratives. We live amid a million unknown tales of family longing, loss, ambition and dysfunction. Our recent history has been shaped by Latino immigration. The narrative of Latin America poverty and the “broken beauty” of places like Iguala is buried deep in the psyche of Los Angeles and other U.S. The young Grande children will do just about anything not to return there. She doles out verbal abuse and keeps the children dressed in rags. “The minute you walk through the door with anything less than A’s,” he tells his three children as they begin school in Los Angeles, “I’m sending you straight back to my mother’s house.” Grandmother Evila’s house in Iguala is infested with scorpions.

he’s a maintenance man who pushes his children to never miss a day of school - when they disobey him, he humiliates and threatens them. The pain of Mexican memories feeds her father’s L.A. Iguala and its unpaved streets, its rural superstitions and its hunger never let go of either young Reyna, her parents or any of her siblings in “The Distance Between Us,” a heart-wrenching account of her impoverished childhood and violence-tinged adolescence. But even when Reyna crosses this divide to live with her father in California, the metaphorical link binding her to a tragically poor corner of Mexico will not die. Immigration has opened a divide between the members of the Grande family that’s 2,000 miles wide.

The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande