Prayers for the Stolen
Jennifer Clement, 2014
Crown Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804138789
Summary
A haunting story of love and survival that introduces an unforgettable literary heroine...
Ladydi Garcia Martínez is fierce, funny and smart. She was born into a world where being a girl is a dangerous thing. In the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, women must fend for themselves, as their men have left to seek opportunities elsewhere.
Here in the shadow of the drug war, bodies turn up on the outskirts of the village to be taken back to the earth by scorpions and snakes. School is held sporadically, when a volunteer can be coerced away from the big city for a semester.
In Guerrero the drug lords are kings, and mothers disguise their daughters as sons, or when that fails they “make them ugly”—cropping their hair, blackening their teeth—anything to protect them from the rapacious grasp of the cartels. And when the black SUVs roll through town, Ladydi and her friends burrow into holes in their backyards like animals, tucked safely out of sight.
While her mother waits in vain for her husband’s return, Ladydi and her friends dream of a future that holds more promise than mere survival, finding humor, solidarity and fun in the face of so much tragedy. When Ladydi is offered work as a nanny for a wealthy family in Acapulco, she seizes the chance, and finds her first taste of love with a young caretaker there.
But when a local murder tied to the cartel implicates a friend, Ladydi’s future takes a dark turn. Despite the odds against her, this spirited heroine’s resilience and resolve bring hope to otherwise heartbreaking conditions.
An illuminating and affecting portrait of women in rural Mexico, and a stunning exploration of the hidden consequences of an unjust war, Prayers for the Stolen is an unforgettable story of friendship, family, and determination. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Greenwich, Connecticut, USa
• Raised—Mexico City, Mexico
• Education—B.A., New York University; M.F.A, Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Mexico City, Mexico
Jennifer Clement is an American author who was raised and lives in Mexico. Born in 1960 in Greenwich, Connecticut, Clement moved in 1961 with her family to Mexico City, where she later attended Edron Academy. She moved to the USA to finish high school at Cranbrook Kingswood School in Bloomfield, Michigan, before studying English Literature and Anthropology at New York University. She received her MFA from the University of Southern Maine. Clement now lives in Mexico City and has two children.
Writing
Clement wrote Widow Basquiat (2000), considered one of the most important books on the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Her three novels include A True Story Based on Lies (2001), which was a finalist in the Orange Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom, The Poison That Fascinates (2008), and Prayers for the Stolen (2014), her first novel to be published in the U.S.
She is also the author of several books of poetry: The Next Stranger (1993), Newton’s Sailor (1997), Lady of the Broom (2002), and Jennifer Clement: New and Selected Poems (2008). In addition to the influence of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Clement says her poetry is inspired by scientific writings, including those of Louis Pasteur and Isaac Newton.
Clement's prize-winning story "A Salamander-Child" has been published as an art book with work by the Mexican painter Gustavo Monroy. She has been translated into 22 languages.
Recognition and honors
Along with her sister Barbara Sibley, Clement is the co-director and founder of the San Miguel Poetry Week. She also severed as president of PEN Mexico and received numerous grants, poet-in residencies, and fellowships.
Honors
2012 - National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowship in Fiction
2009 - President of PEN MEXICO (until 2012)
2002 - Finalist in the Orange Prize for Fiction , UK (for A True Story Based on Lies)
2001 - The Canongate Prize for New Writing
2000 - The Bookseller's Choice List, UK, (for the memoir Widow Basquiat)
(Author bio dapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/15/2014.)
Book Reviews
Beguiling, and even crazily enchanting… [Clement] writes a poet’s prose, spare and simple, creating her world through patterns of repeated and varied metaphors and images that blossom inside the reader like radiant poppies…Prayers for the Stolen gives us words for what we haven’t had words for before, like something translated from a dream in a secret language. The novel is an ebullient yet deeply stirring paean to its female characters’ resiliency and capacity for loyalty, friendship, compassion and love, but also to the power of fiction and poetry.
Francisco Goldman - New York Times Book Review
[A] beautiful, heart-rending novel.... Fiercely observed comparisons of human and inanimate life form a continuing motif throughout the story...[Clement] achieves the formidable feat of smooth, clear English that pulses with an energy and sensibility that is convincingly Latin American… So compelling...Prayers for the Stolen is a powerful read
Wall Street Journal
The author builds a powerful narrative whose images re-create an alarming reality that not everyone has dared to address but that everyone has definitely heard. Let's pray for spoons.
El Paso Times
Hghly original…[Clement’s] prose is poetic in the true sense: precise as a scalpel, lyrical without being indulgent.
Guardian (UK)
What a marvelous writer Clement is....[With] power in a prose that is simple and simply beguiling.
Scotsman (UK)
Bold and innovative…The rich mixture of the outlandishly real and the hyperfabulistic has a certain superstitious power over the reader. Jennifer Clement employs poetry's ability to mirror thought… superbly drawn.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
That is the triumph of Clement’s tone in the novel—she shows the black comedy in the details and the emergency in the broader picture.... There is a chance that fiction can make a difference.
Telegraph (UK)
Beautifully written.... Clement's prose is luminous and startlingly original. The sentences are spare and stripped back, but brilliantly manage to contain complex characters and intense emotional histories in a few vividly poetic words. Her portrayal of modern Mexico is heartbreaking; a dangerous and damaging environment for women, but her portrait of Ladydi and her refusal to be one of the lost girls is defiantly bold and bravely uncompromising
Sunday Express (UK)
Despite its violent premise, this is a darkly comic read with one of the funniest, most touching narrators in years, highlighting a very real issue in a remarkably fresh way. An inspiring story of female resilience.
Psychologies
With Ladydi, Jennifer Clement has created a feisty teenage heroine who is an unforgettable character
Good Housekeeping
[A]n expose of the hideously dangerous lives girls lead in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Despite its social significance, the book doesn’t read like homework; Clement is more a poet than a documentarian.... Clement treats the brutal material honestly but not sensationally, conveying the harshest moments secondhand rather than directly.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In Clement’s powerful new novel, Ladydi Garcia Martinez tells the story of how she grew up in a remote Mexican mountain village disguised as a boy.... Clement’s deft first-person narrative style imbues authenticity to her depiction of a world turned upside down by drug cartels, police corruption, and American exploitation. —Donna Chavez
Booklist
A young girl struggles to survive under the desolate but terrifying umbrella of the Mexican drug wars.... Some thematic elements recall Clement's 2002 novel A True Story Based on Lies, but overall, this is a much richer and more durable tale. A stark portrait of women abused or abandoned by every side in an awful conflict.
Kirkus Reviews
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