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caitthegreateng's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
hurtadomeli's review
5.0
This book deserves 5+++++++++ stars!!! The writing is phenomenal. It was a great palette cleanser after reading so many fantasy books with lackluster writing. While reading this book, I was swimming in metaphors and investigating my own views of ancestry, mysticism, displacement, duality, nature, and storytelling. I annotated almost every single page of this book and I plan to give it to my best friend (who is Colombian like the author) and have her write her thoughts in the margin too. Let the book become a shared intimacy between us.
tara_pikachu's review
4.0
i’ll give contreras benefit of the doubt, this is one of the best memoirs i’ve read in a while. this how i would like to write, this is how i’d like to tell a story.
fenchurch's review against another edition
5.0
Gorgeous prose!
As my memory returned, piece by piece, I grieved. If amnesia was weightlessness, then the opposite was true: every path taken, every word said, every knowledge discovered, every emotion lived—all of it—came back to me with a manifest weight. The narrowing of a life is gravity. Memory is burden. I mourned every ounce of memory returned.
I want to be entombed in layers and layers of memory, the weight so heavy I cannot move.
Because I had no past or preoccupations, no thoughts emerged. I was a quiet that grew into a buzzing. I possessed nothing, which felt like possessing everything.
They seemed to already know that I would seek loss as if it were abundance, that I would treat it like a honed edge I could break myself open on.
I am as old in life as Nono is in death. His body has been disintegrating at the same rate at which my body has been growing. We are two at the edge of the known and the unknown.
Fear once taught the body survival. Teachings leave their echoes.
Ximena and I learned that forgetting was a path to subsistence. We are engineered this way, made to abandon what is too heavy to hold. But the body is a document. It keeps a memory of its own. We are made of loops and loops of time.
The histories and stories of a people are a mirror—they tell how and when and where and why a people lived. No matter the year or the hour, empire will always seek to destroy the mirrors in which it does not see itself. This is why the colonizing culture does not consider our stories passed down through memory to be a valid document; why they are deemed to be more dreams than history, just as our perceived realities are deemed to be fiction. This is the language in power. It has never been able to imagine anything outside itself. But where their thinking ends, ours begins.
bickie's review
5.0
Absolutely magnificent! What a powerful rumination on the complexities of life, power, colonialism, misogynism, feminism, assimilation, memory, dreams, inheritance, family, survival. "After survival, there is the survival of the survival."
I am interested in the title of the book and its focus on Nono, while in many ways, the book is focused on the mirrored experiences of the author and her mother and their shared inheritance through Nono.
I plan to go buy my own copy so that I can re-read and make notes.
The first section of Chapter 23: The Mirror: "...The histories and stories of a people are a mirror--they tell how and when and where and why a people lived. No matter the year or the hour, empire will always seek to destroy the mirrors in which it does not see itself...the language in power. It has never been able to imagine anything outside itself."
Audiobook narration is terrific, which excellent modulation of tone and pace. One thing that was hard was that "Nono" and "Nona" sounded very similar, so I sometimes got confused about which one we were talking about until context made more sense. Often I reread those sections using the hard copy.
I am interested in the title of the book and its focus on Nono, while in many ways, the book is focused on the mirrored experiences of the author and her mother and their shared inheritance through Nono.
I plan to go buy my own copy so that I can re-read and make notes.
The first section of Chapter 23: The Mirror: "...The histories and stories of a people are a mirror--they tell how and when and where and why a people lived. No matter the year or the hour, empire will always seek to destroy the mirrors in which it does not see itself...the language in power. It has never been able to imagine anything outside itself."
Audiobook narration is terrific, which excellent modulation of tone and pace. One thing that was hard was that "Nono" and "Nona" sounded very similar, so I sometimes got confused about which one we were talking about until context made more sense. Often I reread those sections using the hard copy.
lnbrittain's review
5.0
Stunning story of her family, going back generations. It’s memoir, family and country history, and deep philosophical thought. You just have to read it. I haven’t ever read anything like it!