Alone and adrift in Barcelona, an unnamed narrator is haunted by the death of her teenage brother, Diego. Now, his ashes in hand, she must return to Mexico.
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.
