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A review by coffeebooksrepeat
Dead Girls by Selva Almada
4.0
If there’s one genre I could watch round the clock, it would be true crime. However, I couldn’t say the same with written works. While I loved reading true-crime books (I MEAN I LOVED IN COLD BLOOD!!!) when I was younger, the evenings and nights after I finished a book were not without anxiety or nightmares. Why?
Simple. The world is dangerous.
I’d probably get the usual “Men get killed, too, especially at night.” “Men get stabbed, too. Check the news/papers.” Oh, I know. I know that men get killed at night and even during the daytime. But I also know that women are at a higher risk of being assaulted, physically and sexually, come nighttime — when the moon replaces the sun and hides behind the night clouds.
In Dead Girls, Selva Almada brings us to rural Argentina, where young women grew up in households where gender-related violence and attacks were often overlooked and neglected because feeding their family three meals a day was more important than anything else.
There were times that the accounts of the deaths sounded made up; they were too outlandish, too fictionalized. I murmured one too many times, “why psychics?” Then I suddenly realized that most of my relatives, even me at times, resort to hilot and manggamot when pharmaceuticals won’t work. It’s cultural, I think. Or desperation.
The book isn’t perfect. There were times when the facts became too overwhelming that when she presented two different crime stories, case facts overlapped.
But maybe that’s the thing about criminal cases and topics that became too personal — you sometimes lose the flow because you’d often wonder, it could have been you.
Simple. The world is dangerous.
I’d probably get the usual “Men get killed, too, especially at night.” “Men get stabbed, too. Check the news/papers.” Oh, I know. I know that men get killed at night and even during the daytime. But I also know that women are at a higher risk of being assaulted, physically and sexually, come nighttime — when the moon replaces the sun and hides behind the night clouds.
In Dead Girls, Selva Almada brings us to rural Argentina, where young women grew up in households where gender-related violence and attacks were often overlooked and neglected because feeding their family three meals a day was more important than anything else.
There were times that the accounts of the deaths sounded made up; they were too outlandish, too fictionalized. I murmured one too many times, “why psychics?” Then I suddenly realized that most of my relatives, even me at times, resort to hilot and manggamot when pharmaceuticals won’t work. It’s cultural, I think. Or desperation.
The book isn’t perfect. There were times when the facts became too overwhelming that when she presented two different crime stories, case facts overlapped.
But maybe that’s the thing about criminal cases and topics that became too personal — you sometimes lose the flow because you’d often wonder, it could have been you.