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.
The femicide of Liliana Rivera Garza went almost unnoticed by the press when it happened—July 1990—but, thanks to this book, has become emblematic of the failure of Mexican justice to prosecute crimes in which the victim is a woman ... In the novel Cristina Rivera Garza describes the days she herself spent bouncing between precincts and judicial records buildings in search of the closed file on her sister’s murder. Over this melancholic narration, in which Mexico City is lyrically portraited as a beautiful but devastated landscape, Rivera Garza constructs her story as a monument, pulling information from all sorts of sources ... not a journalistic book about the crime that led to the author’s sister’s death, nor is it a literary evocation of a life and the grief its vanishing produced, but something much more powerful that happens at the crossroads of narration and archive. A story, and all the data that needs to be known to be devastated by it. Catharsis—a sentiment strong enough to produce inner change—for a time when reality is amplified by the omnipresence of information.
The narrative is full of a wide variety of characters whose common tie is Liliana, and the author knits all of the stories together with aplomb. Her skilled storytelling movingly depicts the last days of her sister’s life within the context of the continued plague of femicide ... A moving, heart-wrenching memoir as well as an unflinching appraisal of the widespread violence against women in Mexico.
... gut-wrenching blend of memoir and reportage ... Placing her sister’s death in the context of the femicide crisis in Mexico, Rivera Garza interweaves startling facts and statistics... with lyrical meditations on her family life and Liliania’s efforts to break away from her obsessive high school boyfriend ... This piercing remembrance hits home.
