El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo's regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail. Each believing the other to be dead, they escape, fleeing across the globe, reinventing themselves until fate ultimately brings them back together in the most unlikely of ways...
This is an epic story, a remarkable achievement for a writer making her first foray into the literary landscape. Balibrera demonstrates a fearlessness that is rare ... This is not a perfect novel. Deep into the story, too many minor characters are introduced with flourish, never to reappear. The end seems hurried, as if the Furies had suddenly been released and couldn’t decide which direction to go. But these are mere blots on a richly drawn canvas. Mainly, what emerges triumphantly from Balibrera’s pages is a gifted new storyteller with a nose for history and a prodigious imagination.
Lush ... The narrative flow suffers from a lack of context for non-Spanish speakers and rambling story lines that minimize significant events in El Salvadoran history. Still, the young narrators provide irreverent commentary alongside dramatic storytelling depicting the hardscrabble lives of determined sisters yearning for better lives.
