Welcome to Litsy!

It was meant to be the vacation of a lifetime. Mila, Citali, and Dalia, childhood friends now college aged, leave Mexico City for the England of The Clash and the Paris of Courbet. They anticipate the cafés and crushes, but not the early signs that they are each steadily, inevitably changing. Citali is broke upon arrival and barely eating. Dalia is dedicated solely to the group itinerary (and flirting with men and women). Mila, drawn mostly to the bookstores and museums, is simply drifting, reading and working in silence on her latest sewing project while ignoring messages from her boyfriend back home. That was a lifetime ago. Mila, now a writer, has just published a book on the global history of needlecraft--a resonant art form so long dismissed as "women's work." But after learning Citali has drowned, Mila begins to sift through her old scrapbooks, reflecting on their shared youth for the first time as a new wife and mother. What has come of all the nights the three friends spent embroidering together in silence? Did she ignore Citali quietly begging for help? Jazmina Barrera's Cross-stitch, in Christina MacSweeney's taut translation, fuses the cultural history of sewing into a novel that finds its characters hesitant before the specter of adulthood. Mila, Citali, and Dalia--each of them complex, charming, and frustrating--together form a literary tapestry populated by friends and lovers, famous artworks and novels, violence and sexism: they frame the possibility and cruelty of a fraying world in equal measure.