Welcome to Litsy!

“Every 2 hours and 25 minutes, a woman in #Mexico is strangled, raped, dismembered, burned alive, mutilated, beaten to pulp, and left with bruises and broken bones.”

Combine these gruesome facts on femicide with living the high life of drugs, money, cosmetic surgery and Instagram followers and you probably have the span of Mexican society and of this #InternationalBooker collection of short stories. A good one.

#ReadingTheWorld2025

Intense. Be careful going into this on, lots of TWs. It starts with a bang as narrator 1 decides and goes through a misoprostol abortion on her own, the last story that focuses on a best friend murder but is at its heart about femicide in Mexico was incredibly powerful.
My only criticism is that the voices of each narrator were the same, I would have liked to have seen more language and cadence variety.
You can tell a poet helped translate 👇

This is a tough book. But also very poetic

"I was dead. Those fucking mayates had killed me. I held my bloody hand and cried for a while."

#BookerInternational

"But even though my great- grandmother, grandmother, and mother were all pioneers who broke the glass ceiling so women could hold the offices where decisions are made, amigui, I'm not really into public service or politics, myself. I don't want to wield power, I want to marry it. Know what I mean? Zero Angela Merkel, all Michelle Obama."

The point of feminism is that women have choices, but if she thinks MO had no power she doesn't understand

This book of linked short stories is really a gut punch, in a good way. It mixes grief and humor and love to tell these poignant individual stories of women in Mexico against the backdrop of politics, religion and the horror of femicide. A great read from the Booker Intl list.

THIS! I have been obsessing over this book for the last 24 hours (my poor friends! 🤣).

These short stories are devastating, but are told with such heart and in such a relatable, (but simultaneously so unrelatable) way, that you just want to call everyone up so that they can start reading, too!

LOVED! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I felt like reading something in Spanish and this looked like a great choice!

I had no idea what the book was about but I‘ve heard great things about this writer.

What a book. 13 linked stories where a main character in one story, can show up as a minor character in another story.

The stories in this collection is told in a one-side conversational way, and I loved that

About abortion, violence against women and femicide, the cartels, and grief

#InternationalBooker

Every two hours and twenty-five minutes a woman in Mexico is strangled, raped, dismembered, burned alive, mutilated, beaten to a pulp, and left with bruises and broken bones. A woman‘s body, another woman. Some woman, a nameless woman. A lifeless body was found.

What a first story. But if the rest of the stories in this collection is like this one, I‘m in for a treat

I‘m not going to say too much about what it‘s about, but I loved all the references to watching Legally Blonde, Miss Congeniality and Almost Famous

Pitch dark interconnected stories of women's lives and violence in Mexico. Stories of violent women bleed into those about violence against women, revenge and rage intermingle with ironic teenage posing and sarcasm. Most of these stories work. There were some that I just wanted more from, to delve deeper, but sometimes the true weight of a story was felt as connections were made in later tales. The last few stories were, IMO, the strongest.

"There is no room of one's own when men think our bodies belong to them."

"Life's a bitch. That's why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she's foaming at the mouth."

Happy #InternationalBooker Longlist Day!

Which have you read? Loved? Loathed? Which are going on your TBR? I won't be reading the whole list, but I'll check out what I can get through the library, starting with the tagged. I'm also looking forward to The Book of Disappearance and On a Woman's Madness, both of which I can get through hoopla.

#IntlBookerLonglist #IntlBooker25 #BooksinTranslation