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A review by verbamatic
Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
adventurous
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Novels don’t come queerer than this. And few come more difficult to recover from, or to truly understand.
A lesbian couple: Quity (a cis woman) and Cleopatra (a trans woman) have fled from Buenos Aires to live in Miami, where Quity gave birth to their daughter. But this is merely a frame of the actual plot and the actual point of the story is the ravaged slum and the dead friends/chosen family they left behind. And Slum Virgin refers to a wacky concrete cast of the Catholic deity that adorned their shantytown - you see, Cleopatra could communicate with her.
The narration is facile, jokey, and extremely matter-of-fact, if not outright cynical. It belies the horrors of what is actually described. The couple, who are narrators and main characters are difficult to like or even to understand, they are thus probably two of the most well-developed, fully-human characters I had ever read in fiction. They are ambiguous, they don’t make sense, they interrupt and argue with each other, they are unrealiable, and they, too, are not angels. Just like real people.
The ending was confusing and unexpected, but entirely fitting this difficult novel, and will keep me thinking about it for a long time yet.
A lesbian couple: Quity (a cis woman) and Cleopatra (a trans woman) have fled from Buenos Aires to live in Miami, where Quity gave birth to their daughter. But this is merely a frame of the actual plot and the actual point of the story is the ravaged slum and the dead friends/chosen family they left behind. And Slum Virgin refers to a wacky concrete cast of the Catholic deity that adorned their shantytown - you see, Cleopatra could communicate with her.
The narration is facile, jokey, and extremely matter-of-fact, if not outright cynical. It belies the horrors of what is actually described. The couple, who are narrators and main characters are difficult to like or even to understand, they are thus probably two of the most well-developed, fully-human characters I had ever read in fiction. They are ambiguous, they don’t make sense, they interrupt and argue with each other, they are unrealiable, and they, too, are not angels. Just like real people.
The ending was confusing and unexpected, but entirely fitting this difficult novel, and will keep me thinking about it for a long time yet.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Vomit, War, Trafficking, Sexual assault, Racial slurs, Mental illness, Addiction, Toxic relationship, Suicide, Sexual violence, Sexual content, and Torture
(It comes with literally every TW you can think of. Particularly, extreme violence incl. sexual violence, homophobia and drug abuse).