Prayers for the Stolen (Clement) - Book Reviews

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