Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine: book review

Sabrina & Corina (2019) is set near Denver, Colorado, in the United States in a little town called Saguarita. It is a collection of eleven stories of Latinas in the American West.

It begins with a female narrator in school and a boy named Roberto Martinez, the bone boy. The second story, Sabrina & Corina, is tragic and violent, narrated by Corina, as she remembers the days when they were inseparable in high school, and in their 20s when they were working and saw each other less and less. In another story, there is Doty and Tina, who don’t talk about the regular everyday violence. In one story, Tomi leaves prison and returns to her childhood home. Alana and Avel and Pearla have their own stories.

In ‘Any Further West’ the narrator is twelve years old as her mother is in her bedroom searching for her gold bikini. She’s making plans to leave ‘this real dump’ of a town. Two months later, her mother drives to their new home, ‘Eula Court curved like a shark’s fin from one green gully filled with trash to another. Rows of rainbow-colored houses flickered by until my mother parked the car outside a boxy home, sunshine yellow with white trim.’

Each story is about Latina characters – strong women’s views about their lives, friendships, families, relationships, abandonments, and ancestral traditions – retaining them or breaking free from them. The women are scared, scarred, or scathing. But all keep on going, never giving up their integrity and strength.

Mostly, though, the stories are about home – staying in it, leaving it, returning to it, hating it, loving it, remembering it, defining it. These are great stories with grit, interesting characters, and hard-edged stories, amid difficult lands and landscapes.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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