RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn her wrenching debut...Gabriela Garcia meticulously weaves a mesh of parallels between Latinx mothers and daughters ... this is also a true poet’s novel: a painstaking attentiveness to rhythm and metaphor allows Garcia to sketch complicated, thorny parallels between mothers and daughters ... Garcia has made the powerful, and I think correct, decision neither to center nor to humanize any of the violent men in the novel, leaving them one-dimensional, affording them no redemption. This choice, and the decision never to position writing as a form of healing, disrupts comparisons with Isabel Allende’s 1982 novel The House of the Spirits. That said, both are, in their ways, accomplished and brave works that speak out against Latinx intergenerational trauma. The greatest success of this debut novel, for me, is the devastating way Garcia shows that the violent enforcement of gendered (non)belonging takes place simultaneously at the national and personal levels.
