...groundbreaking.

With the precision of a master seamstress — not unlike that of his paternal grandmother, Mamá Tey, who migrated from El Salvador with the money earned courtesy of her iron Singer sewing machine — Lovato braids a narrative that spans nine decades and weaves together El Salvador’s history of genocide, civil war, revolution and migration with his family’s own.

... determined to unravel the many stereotypes that outsiders like Didion have perpetuated about the country, to make room for new insights about the trauma that generations of Salvadorans have endured.

... a memoir that situates his family’s story within the broader history of what he dubs 'the tiny country of titanic sorrows,' Lovato describes a personal awakening to El Salvador’s century-old cycle of violence, the process that prompted his turn to journalism as a means of grappling with the scale of the nation’s trauma.

...at once profoundly personal and historically significant.

Lovato, a longtime activist and journalist, undertakes a pensive journey in this memoir through various underworlds in El Salvador and the United States, with many tools and guides at his disposal. First among them is a machete. Wielded as a metaphor, its long, sharp blade is sufficient to cut through the density of buried secrets and trauma, both personal and political.

In this challenging and rewarding book, journalist and activist Lovato passionately weaves his own highly personal account with those of the people of El Salvador along with Salvadorans in the United States.

[A] memorable indictment of the civil war in Central America that drove a wave of migration to the U.S..

Salvadoran-American journalist Lovato recounts in this anguished memoir his 2015 trip to El Salvador to investigate the country’s horrific gang wars.