BookBrowse Reviews The New Earth by Jess Row

Jess Row's novel The New Earth begins in 2018, the trenches of the Trump years, when life became especially dangerous and precarious for undocumented immigrants in the United States, and when hope for a better, less cruel world seemed at a new low.

In these environs, Winter Wilcox, an immigration lawyer in Providence, Rhode Island, suddenly and surprisingly decides to marry her partner Zeno, an undocumented immigrant from Chiapas, Mexico, with whom she's having a child. Surprisingly because both Winter and Zeno have strained relationships with their families and don't want to replicate the dynamics they grew up in—and also because Zeno could be deported at any time, making planning a wedding for five months in the future impractically optimistic.

But a wedding is a tried-and-true way to, dramatically speaking, get the gang back together again, and the Wilcoxes need an ...