A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award, this debut collection follows Latina characters of indigenous ancestry as they navigate a precarious existence in the American West, where they confront with quiet force generational poverty, violence, racism, and misogyny.
... 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.
