Grip

To be honest, I'm not good at remembering characters. But that's what most novels ask us to do. 

So, the gods and goddesses, mythical beings, as what my daughter's reading of Rick Riordan's book series entails, would be almost impossible for me to comprehend. I don't even know how to figure out "who's who" when I read the not-so-divine novel Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.

But there is a catch: It's not every novel that has a large cast of characters for us to keep track of. If you're easy to get lost in the cast, you may decide to pick up the novel by Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt, as what I recently did after my brother's recommendation. There aren't too many characters: a Mexican mother and her son, and sixteen other family members. If you worry about the number of characters, I will be the first to reassure you. The sixteen of them, for that matter, were dead bodies in the backyard by the end of the first chapter. All killed by the end of the first few pages.

Seriously, though, story of the mother and son after the massacre is riveting enough to grip our attention.