"I have a golden rule. I always believe a woman more than a man."

Very good book. Very difficult topic. I think in a way the language, which is very basic, simplifies the issue a bit, but then again it never really shies away from it either so maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it would have been a lot harder to read if it had had another tone.

Honestly, while I've obviously heard a bit about human trafficking and such I hadn't really heard about the specific issues in this book, about deliberately making yourself out like a boy to avoid getting stolen. It's a really, really depressing situation, but there's heart to it as well in the novel, it's not all misery and issues, there's also lots of love and respect ... for women, and women only.

Also, this is a very quick read, so I'd honestly recommend it to anyone. ( )

"Don’t ever pray for love and health, Mother said. Or money. If G-d hears what you really want he will not give it to you. Guaranteed. When my father left my mother said, get down on your knees and pray for spoons."

Say a prayer for spoons…
This is a book about young girls being stolen from their families by drug cartels and then sold on to the highest bidder. It’s not a true story, in the individual sense, but it’s based on true stories. These girls, like Paula in the book, really do exist. They are systematically kidnapped, but they never come back. They are voiceless.

After reading the book, I read in an interview a line where Jennifer Clement states, “I know if cars were being stolen there would be greater outrage.” She points out how single dramatic events hit the news, but the everyday silent plight of these women fails to gain attention. These girls come from poor, vulnerable communities with limited educational resources and may only speak their indigenous language, not Spanish. Clement has decided to speak on their behalf, through a young Mexican girl with the unlikely name of Ladydi (Lady Di).

Say a prayer for ladders…
I bought the book because I’m making an effort to read more by Latin American women, but then I left it on the bookshelf for a while as its content seemed rather frightening. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a novel, even a 222-page short novel, about systematic sex-abuse. It seemed unlikely to be a comfortable read and I doubted that it would make me laugh. On the laughter part, I was wrong.

Say a prayer for punctuation…
The book is the work of Jennifer Clement whose life has been split over the two sides of that troublesome border of Mexico’s north. Her book is set entirely in Mexico where she lives, but was written in English with an English sense of style. This is noticeable as the paragraphs and sentences are super short. It stands in contrast to the other books I’ve been reading by Latin American authors. Paragraphing is out of fashion in Latin America.

However, like many Latin American authors, Clement doesn’t use quotation marks to frame speech. Previously, if you’d asked me if quotation marks were important, I’d have said yes. However, since reading a few books without them, I’ve come to think of them as a stylistic choice. Your pedants might complain, but it doesn’t interrupt the flow. You seem to know when someone is speaking.

Based on my wider reading and a conversation with a fellow book lover, it seems that these punctuational deviations stem from the pen of James Joyce. Read a little around the topic of Latin American literature and you’ll stumble over Ulysses.

Say a prayer for mockingbirds…
Prayers for the Stolen reminded me of reading To Kill A Mockingbird in school. Ladydi reminded me of Scout and I found myself reflecting on the choice of a child protagonist. How do you persuade the reader that the narrator is a child, without the writing itself being simplistic? Clement does this particularly well. Her sentences are often simply structured, and you can read a few paragraphs without coming to a comma, not because she’s missing out commas, but because her structures don’t require them. She’s generous with the simple words like ‘and’ and ‘but’ and so creates an easy flowing text, but with surprising quirks that keep you alert. Ladydi’s voice is naive and uneducated, but never boring: child-like, but never childish.

"The very next morning Julio, the gardener, walked through the front door and I fell in love.

He walked right into my body.

He climbed up my ribs and into me. I thought to myself, Say a prayer for ladders.

I wanted to smell his neck and place my mouth on his mouth and taste him and hold him. I wanted to smell the smell of garden and grass and palm tree, smell of rose and leaf and lemon flower. I fell in love with the gardener and his name was Julio."

Say a prayer for shelves…
You know instinctively that Clement reads and writes poetry. This childlike voice of Ladydi reminded me of The God of Small Things and how Arundhati Roy also creates the innocence of childhood linguistics with playful rewriting of the dictionary and a throwaway tumbling of images, metaphors crammed into adjectives.

"Though you couldn’t see the river from the house anymore, like a seashell always has a sea-sense, the Ayemenem house still had a river-sense.

A rushing, rolling, fishswimming sense."

- [a:Arundhati Roy|6134|Arundhati Roy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1496705394p2/6134.jpg], [b:The God of Small Things|9777|The God of Small Things|Arundhati Roy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1590282886l/9777._SY75_.jpg|810135]

"Because I loved Julio, the cars and trucks outside on the street sounded like rivers. … Cement walls became mirrors. My small ugly hands turned into starfish."

And it’s this innocence, this flavour of pictures, this childlike perspective which makes the book so readable. In an interview, Clement said:

Even in doing the research for Prayers for the Stolen, I was also always looking for the poetic experience and how the divine coexists with the profane or beauty with ugliness. I also wanted the novel to have enchantment.

And she succeeded.

Say a prayer for magazines
Before writing the book, Clement spent a decade researching. She interviewed women in hiding: the wives, daughters and girlfriends of drugs traffickers. And she interviewed women from Mexico City’s Santa Martha Acatitla Prison during art therapy sessions. The inmates used collage as a way of giving voice to their own stories – a scene enacted towards the end of the novel.

So, although I picked it off my shelf, out of curiosity – I’d been thinking about punctuation – I must have forgotten my intention… I sat down on the bed below my shelf and kept reading until I was halfway through. It was the style that kept me there, the rhythm of Ladydi’s tale flowed and despite the context, I didn’t find myself recoiling and turning away (as I had in Laura Restrepo’s Delirium a few weeks earlier).

Pray for the stolen…
I loved how Jennifer Clement reaches out her gentle hands in a gesture of humanity to sections of society typically treated so inhumanely. Her characters weren’t playing at being likeable, some were drug traffickers or murders, some were painfully naive and others criminally deluded, and yet… although they’d all broken the law, you couldn’t help but find your heart aching for them.

It’s a true skill, I think, to maintain such tenderness.

First published on https://happenence.co.uk/prayers-for-the-stolen-by-jennifer-clement/ ( )

“¿Puedes creer que haya sólo veintisiete letras para decirlo todo? Sólo hay veintisiete letras para hablar del amor y los celos y Dios.”
*
No sabía de la existencia de este libro. Pienso que se tendría que haber hablado más de él o su autora. La primera parte es brutal, desoladora pero no puedes parar de leerla. El resto me pareció que se desarrollaba un poco apresurado para encontrar el final, pero en general es muy bueno. El final no decepciona.
*
El libro trata sobre la vida de las mujeres en Guerrero, como víctimas del narco, la migración de los hombres, la desigualdad. Muy cerca de los lujos extremos de Acapulco, hay niñas que deben esconderse como conejos, en madrigueras y negar que son mujeres hasta que no pueden ocultarlo más, para retrasar lo más posible el convertirse en objetos. En una simple botella de agua a la que agarran porque tienen sed. Las mujeres sirven sólo como testigos del odio hacia ellas mismas y testigos de toda esa gente que desaparece, así nomás. Por el narco, por la migra, por el desamor, por el crimen, por la venganza de todo lo anterior sin dejar rastro o incluso, dejando la tele prendida.

*
“La compasión no es una calle de doble sentido.”
*
“Una mujer que desaparece es sólo otra hoja que se va por la cuneta de una tormenta” ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It's writing is almost like Ladydi is sitting down with you and telling you her story. It has some suspenseful parts but it's very easy to understand and easy to read.

I received this book courtesy of Blogging for Books, in exchange for my review. ( )

Löysin Jennifer Clementin kun luin Rakkaudesta aseisiin ja tämä on kyllä ehdottomasti yhtä hyvä. ((Spoiler alert!!)) Poikkeukselliset henkilöhahmot ja tragikoomiset tapahtumasarjat värittävät tarinaa jossa nuori kertojatyttö päätyy kotikylästään ensin lastenhoitajaksi perheeseen jota ei koskaan tapaa ja sitten vankilaan. Jennifer Clement on huippu! ( )