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jessrock 's review for:
Prayers for the Stolen
by Jennifer Clement
This is not a lighthearted book by any stretch of the imagination. Prayers for the Stolen is set in the state of Guerrero in Mexico, in a mountain town ravaged by the drug trade. The men have all left, either to try to make a living in the United States or to join the drug trade, and the women do everything they can to make themselves look ugly so they won't be kidnapped. The children grow up with a different volunteer schoolteacher coming to their remote town each year, and they learn life-preserving tricks like running away from the sound of helicopters (which might be dropping dangerous herbicides from above) and concealing themselves in holes in the ground when they hear the sound of SUVs screeching into town.
The narrator sounds bored and matter-of-fact when describing both the best and the worst elements in her life. When we discussed this book in my book club, a lot of people were bothered by how emotionally flat she seemed and how we couldn't get into her head. Those characteristics felt authentic to me given her situation, but it's true that Ladydi is not a narrator who is going to let you get close to her.
"Enjoyed" is not the right word for a book like Prayers for the Stolen, but I raced through the first half of the book because I was very engaged with the story. However, only the first half of the book is set in the mountain village, and once Ladydi leaves for Acapulco, the story started losing its power for me. When the scene changes again for the final section of the book, we are suddenly introduced to many characters all at once without much reason to care about most of them, and everything really fell apart for me at that point.
Overall I'm glad I read Prayers for the Stolen; it's an eye-opening novel in a lot of ways because the issues it describes are real. However, it didn't really work as a cohesive novel to me, and what was supposed to feel horrific the whole way through started feeling absurd toward the end.
The narrator sounds bored and matter-of-fact when describing both the best and the worst elements in her life. When we discussed this book in my book club, a lot of people were bothered by how emotionally flat she seemed and how we couldn't get into her head. Those characteristics felt authentic to me given her situation, but it's true that Ladydi is not a narrator who is going to let you get close to her.
"Enjoyed" is not the right word for a book like Prayers for the Stolen, but I raced through the first half of the book because I was very engaged with the story. However, only the first half of the book is set in the mountain village, and once Ladydi leaves for Acapulco, the story started losing its power for me. When the scene changes again for the final section of the book, we are suddenly introduced to many characters all at once without much reason to care about most of them, and everything really fell apart for me at that point.
Overall I'm glad I read Prayers for the Stolen; it's an eye-opening novel in a lot of ways because the issues it describes are real. However, it didn't really work as a cohesive novel to me, and what was supposed to feel horrific the whole way through started feeling absurd toward the end.