The Tortilla Curtain has skyrocketed to the top of my all-time favorite books. The blurb on the front cover caused my hand to select it from the crowded bookstore shelf: “A rich and moving novel about the price of the American dream by ‘America’s most imaginative contemporary novelist.’” I have kids who would ionize into statutes in front of the TV if I let them; I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451; I’m a proud member of the squeezed middle class; I daydream about moving to California, are a few reasons a book about the American dream appealed to me.

The blurb was right on about T.C. Boyle’s prowess as a novelist. The story is pure craft, pure magic. Boyle weaves the story of two families, one from an upper-middle class community in the hills of Los Angeles, the other illegal immigrants from Mexico. Their lives intersect in numerous ways throughout the book, and every single time you’re quickly reminded that yes, they do live in the same town, same country, same world because it’s very easy to forget this fact.

At the heart of the matter is America’s immigration situation. While most of us are aware that thousands of immigrants cross U.S. borders every day, for states such as California, who share a border with Mexico, immigration is an intense situation. I promise I won’t sidestep into a history lesson, although the urge is tremendous, other than to remind you that these same issues have existed since Christopher Columbus and the ensuing gold rush. There are countless ways to look at this issue, and Boyle does a fine job of tackling a few of them. In other words, if you want to start up a good family dinner feud, try opening up this topic for discussion.

On one side of the “curtain,” Boyle shows us, are bigots who want to build walls around their Acuras and silver cutlery to keep out the needy, the desperate. On the other side are human beings who are escaping Mexico, “a country with forty percent unemployment and a million people a year entering the labor force, a country that was corrupt and bankrupt and so pinched by inflation that the farmers were burning their crops and nobody but the rich had enough to eat.”

As you read Candido and America’s struggle to survive in California, you will wonder if they haven't entered a place that is far worse than Mexico.

Boyle uses nature throughout the story to raise many of his (our) questions about immigration. Humans, he shows us, especially those living in California, are vulnerable to Mother Nature. Outside our disputes with each other exist powers infinitely beyond our control, in the form of animals, fire, water, earth, and wind. Class differences disappear in the eyes of Mother Nature; she shows no preference.

Speaking of prowess, this story has an unusually high abundance of climatic moments—of the edge-of-your-seat rising tension kind. Here’s an excerpt about the famous brush fires we’ve all seen and heard about on the news:

“Don’t stop! No!” Candido cried, slapping furiously at America every time she faltered. “Keep going! Run, mujer, run!” The wind could change direction at any moment, at whim, and if it did they were dead, though he knew they should have been dead already, cremated along with the turkey. He urged her on. Shoved and shouted and half-carried her. The canyon was a funnel, a conduit, the throat of an inconceivable flamethrower, and they had to get up and out of it, up to the road and across the blacktop and on up through the chaparral to the high barren rock of the highest peak. That was all he could think of, up, up, and up, that naked rock, high above it all, and there was nothing to burn up there, was there?

I loved this book. It’s truly unforgettable. And even more, it’s the kind of story that will make you thankful for whatever you have—even if you believe it’s not much. It’s also a story that has finally curbed my California longing for sun and beach 365 days a year. Now that I’ve seen a close-up of Mother Nature in action (fiction is based on reality, after all), I guess I’d rather freeze my ________ off in February’s negative temperatures than fear death by fire, mudslide, or earthquake year after year.

Read this book!