Jeanine Cummins’ bestselling novel 'American Dirt' has elicited protests over the author's lack of Latinx credentials, but the bigger problem is that the book is plodding moralistic melodrama. In Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt, main character Lydia Pérez is a middle class, college-educated bookstore owner in Acapulco. She has a nine-year-old son with her husband Sebastián who is an investigative reporter at the local newspaper. She is bored by her clientele, who mostly consist of tourists and buyers of knickknacks, until one day a man with huge soul and an exquisite taste that nearly matches her own enters her shop...