Award-winning author Shanthi Sekaran’s “Lucky Boy,” is a timely new book nominated by the Global Nation Book Club, an Amazon Best Book for 2017, and has received starred reviews by the Library Journal and Kirkus for its courage and realism in descriptively telling the gripping story of an immigrant experience. The story is about a young, undocumented girl named Soli from Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca who leaves her home for a perilous journey to the United States, crossing the border illegally, and finding her way to a cousin’s home in Berkeley, California. Her life is upended by deportation and a devastating forced separation from her son.
While researching immigration stories for her book, author Sekaran asked: “My question was what really is the difference between an undocumented and a documented immigrant?” “I started to see that the difference is simply paperwork.” Undocumented or not, Sekaran says, people often leave their countries with “the same hopes, the same fears — they all want something better than what they’ve had in their past lives. The real difference is in the paper that they’re given or not given in order to realize this dream.”
In his 22 years of devotion to immigration law, Edward Shulman, Esq. of the Shulman Law Group compassionately hears heartbreaking stories of the plight of undocumented immigrants on a daily basis. Yet, when reading and reviewing Sekaran’s new novel, attorney Shulman was struck by the author’s fresh approach and the urgently compelling voice she gives her main character. Shuman said, “in the current political climate where anti-immigrant sentiments are being loudly projected, stories like the one told by Sekaran are critically important so that people may understand the gripping emotional experiences many undocumented immigrants endure.”