On July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice. Liliana's Invincible Summer tells the story of a spirited, romantic young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence.
Punctilious, fury-driven, incandescent ... Despite her furnace of rage, Rivera Garza maintains perfect composure throughout Liliana’s Invincible Summer ... Rivera Garza’s memoir is both master stroke and a critical inflection point in her country’s brutal, patriarchal politics. But grief lingers, hermetically sealed.
Powerful ... She may never find what she is seeking, but writing about the process is a kind of conjuring of the sister she lost. An artful catharsis. Her words come together in a book that is not so much plot-driven but rather a very careful excavation ... The reader is privy to photographs and other ephemera left behind. The most minute details contain multitudes. Every word counts ... Not everything can be put into words, especially grief and rage, no matter how precise and skilled the writing is. The beauty of this book is that it reaches for that truth regardless, and in doing so, Liliana becomes indelible.She is so fully realized that by the end, the reader is also mourning. I will be thinking of Liliana for a very long time, perhaps forever.
This collaged portrait is one of the most effective resurrections of a murder victim I have ever read ... Rivera Garza draws her sister, then complicates that drawing and then complicates the complication, creating layer upon layer of nuance. That said, Rivera Garza’s choice to place so much of the narrative into the hands of others... while preserving Liliana’s voice, also occasionally makes for a challenging read ... And yet I understand why Rivera Garza cedes the narrative to Liliana and her friends when she does: In this book, it’s the very lack of language that’s significant. By displaying the fragmented, liminal space in which Liliana and her friends discuss Liliana’s life, Rivera Garza is bearing witness to the dearth of ways they had to speak about violence that was right in front of them.
