... fierce and essential stories ... history always resurfaces, and the landscape mirrors the cycles at play in the characters’ lives ... The image of the two girls observing themselves in their grandmother’s mirrors, and hoping to emerge somehow as women in control of how the world perceives them, would seem to represent the feminine agency, legacy and kinship that govern the hearts of every character in this book.
You will clutch your heart reading Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection Sabrina & Corina. Her stories are that heartbreaking, each one like a gift from a small child, offered with earnest, luminous eyes, innocence itself, impossible to reject. There are 11 stories, slightly joined by their characters, most of them brown women: Native Americans, Latinas, or both, all so clearly drawn that they must surely be living physical lives as real people somewhere ... the delicate prose and the restrained, patient, plots are only some of the reasons for the well-deserved interest around this debut collection ... go find yourself a copy of this thrilling, touching, beautiful book.
...powerful...brilliant...stories that need to be heard ... In Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut story collection Sabrina & Corina we find a different narrative of the West. These are women who inhabit a space between the Indigenous and the Latinx, they are fierce, powerful in their own way, and many have suffered unspeakable trauma ... But not all of the women in these stories come to terrible ends. Some are survivors ... there is a deeper resonance here—a connection with family, with memory, and with story that speaks of a survival that moves beyond any attempt at erasure. These are voices that must be heard, stories that must be read.
... engrossing ... Fajardo-Anstine skillfully weaves in aspects of Latinx identity - Spanish terms, attire, cooking - with bursts of knowledge about the prejudices and discrimination that stalked the Old West and still linger to this day.
Stories that bravely reinvent the Wild West narrative by lifting up Latinx women and portraying callused hand cowboys not as heroes, but as villains and perpetrators of violence.
[These] stories are linked...by hardship. Women grapple with varieties of abandonment and betrayal—from absent fathers and abusive suitors to the gentrification of their neighborhoods and the theft of their ancestors’ remains. Their relationship to place is rich and complicated ... Kali Fajardo-Anstine['s]...gritty and tender debut gives voice to so many women whose stories are rarely heard, and that’s another way the book’s title functions—to announce upfront whose stories these are.
Latina and Indigenous American women who long to be seen—and see themselves—are the beating heart of the stories in Fajardo-Anstine’s rich and radiant debut ... Sharing her characters’ southern Colorado homelands, Fajardo-Anstine imbues her stories with a strong sense of place and the infinite unseen generations that coexist in even single moments.
Eleven achingly realistic stories set in Denver and southern Colorado bear witness to the lives of Latina women of Indigenous descent trying to survive generations of poverty, racism, addiction, and violence ... Fajardo-Anstine takes aim at our country's social injustices and ills without succumbing to pessimism. The result is a nearly perfect collection of stories that is emotionally wrenching but never without glimmers of resistance and hope.
In Fajardo-Anstine’s beautiful debut collection,she dexterously explores what it means to be Latina, indigenous, and female in ways both touching and powerful ...These stories are stirring meditations on the lives of Latinas of indigenous ancestry; Fajardo-Anstine’s collection is vividly alive with the love and pain of its characters, while echoing with the spiritual power of their pasts.
