RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAlthough this debut novel is inspired by the author’s personal experiences (as noted in an afterword), you don’t need to have grown up in Bogotá to be taken in by Contreras’s simple but memorable prose and absorbing story line ... Contreras’s depiction of growing up amid such constant violence provides some of the most arresting passages in the book. I couldn’t help scribbling exclamation marks beside the descriptions of the games Chula and her sister play, in which unfortunate Barbies are brutally mutilated ... Tied in with Chula’s bewilderment about her homeland is her curiosity about Petrona [the family maid], whose sections are narrated with lovely simplicity and provide the heart of the book. There’s an elusiveness and obliqueness to Petrona’s narration, perhaps an acknowledgment of the difficulty of representing the voices of those who rarely get to speak for themselves in literary fiction ... In terms of structure, the plot is dependent on Chula’s family being consistently unlucky, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It works, though, to highlight the suffering that many Colombian families had to endure for generations.
