Nothing is easy for undocumented Mexican immigrant Solimar "Soli" Castro Valdez in Shanthi Sekaran's second novel, Lucky Boy (after The Prayer Room). Nor is it a piece of cake for Indian American Kavya Reddy, who at 35 is a Cal-Berkeley sorority cook whose husband, Rishi, works at the Bay Area dotcom Weebies. Kavya and Rishi seem to have it knocked, except for Kavya's desire to have a child.
Two thousand miles south, Soli is desperate to escape her tiny Oaxaca farm town. She arrives at her cousin's house in Berkeley after a harrowing ride on Mexico's informal immigrant express train "The Beast" and a gang-rape by bandits. A disheartened and pregnant brown woman without papers among the privileged who prowl farmer's markets, Soli takes a housekeeping job to pay board at her cousin's, send a little home to her parents and save something to seed the American dream for her expected son--her lucky boy.
As the Reddys work through the social services adoption bureaucracy, Soli delivers her healthy son, Ignacio, and for a year she carries him everywhere. When Immigration discovers that she is in the country illegally, however, Ignacio, a U.S. citizen by birth, is taken to social services while Soli is put in a detention center to await deportation. No surprise in who become Ignacio's foster parents. But that is not the end of the story. There are few easy solutions to life's toughest problems, but Sekaran's Lucky Boy goes a long way toward putting a humanizing face on them. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.