Signs Preceding The End of The World by Yuri Nerrera

This novella takes the crossing of a border and all that that entails, and makes it into something of mythical proportions, all in about one hundred pages.  Please do not miss this gorgeous rendition of the experience of immigrants on our southern border, all the while keeping an eye on how we treat our own.  It doesn't detract from that one bit.
The book opens with Makina, our heroine, surviving a lethal sinkhole that swallows a man, a car, and more,  in a generic silver-mining town in Mexico.  Sh is a smart and intuitive young woman who survives the sinkhole as she does every pitfall in the book, thinking of herself as “the door not the one who walks through it”.  She  runs the switchboard with the only phone for miles around, speaking three languages – an Amerindian “native tongue”, Spanish, and English.  She is a medium of sorts, a messenger.
She is sent by her mother to bring back her more gullible brother from across the US border, where he has been lured by the false hope of land from a long-absent father, she journeys through Mexico– and thence by bus to the Rio Grande, crossing the roiling green river in an inner tube and running the desert gauntlet of people-smugglers, vigilantes and border patrols.
What she finds in the end is not what she expected, but everything in between is exactly as she thought it would be.  Luminous.