A review by danielles_reads
Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.5

I have mixed feelings on this one. This is essentially a collection of essays, and some of them were a lot stronger than others for me. The writing style is very poetic, lyrical, and abstract (kudos to the translator and audiobook narrator, who both did a great job!), which worked for some topics and not others. Some of the essays were so abstract that I couldn't understand what the author was really getting at (she would say "and that is the question" and I would be like, "wait, what question?"). Since one thesis of this book is the power of writing, I think Rivera Garza was more focused on the therapeutic aspect of writing, both for herself as the author and for the Mexican readers experiencing this horror, as opposed to directly informing people outside of Mexico. So knowing a decent amount of Mexican history from the late 1800s to early 1900s, thanks to the book Bad Mexicans, helped me a little bit by giving me some context that wasn't explictly provided in this book. Though I also feel like audio might not have been the best way to consume this content.

In the near future I plan to go through the lines I bookmarked in order to list the essays I resonated with the most.