A novel that refuses to reduce grief to a scheduled tour through ennobling sorrows ... This nonlinear structure accurately portrays grief as a cacophony of ricocheting feelings ... Unlike peddlers of platitudes, Navarro is a major talent who knows that the most important stages of grief are ambivalence and guilt.
Navarro’s focus is on the stresses and sorrows that accompany absence and arise out of longing for friends and family, one’s distant homeland, and the freedoms that are promised or imagined ... The threat of violence toward women is omnipresent in the novel ... All of this death, danger, and dislocation intensifies the stresses and losses that the narrator has carried with her since the day her mother first left.
While Navarro is broadly interested in themes of immigration and the colonial legacy, the novel is firmly rooted in the specific, palpable lives of her characters, which she renders with nuance and honesty ... A sensitive portrayal of sibling love, grief, and the trauma of dislocation.
The grieving unnamed narrator of Mexican writer Navarro’s spellbinding U.S. debut ruminates on the effects of migration ... Navarro crafts a realistic depiction of memory’s free association, as her narrator bounces like a pinball from one idea to the next. This sorrowful novel teems with life.
