Prayers for the Stolen

Book 5 - A book by an author you've never read before

 

Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement

 

A few months back I entered our church building and attended to the customary check of my mailbox. To my surprise, among the brochures and miscellaneous church papers, I discovered a novel.

As many of you know, I am rather a large fan of novels.

I cannot express the excitement that ensued when I observed what lay upright in my mailbox. The first thought that came upon my mind was that I was the lucky participant of a mailbox book exchange. Alas, I was specifically chosen (by my pastor) to read this specific book; and unfortunately that is as far as it has gone. I will have to bring up a mailbox book exchange idea and see how she feels about it.

This novel is based in a small town in Mexico where the girls are made too look like boys to avoid being noticed by the drug traffickers. All the fathers have left their families to make money in America and after a few brief visits home, they don't return.

I can identify with the idea that all the men had left their families to move to America in search of better jobs and more money. Every spring our town becomes home to thousands of migrant workers. Men who have come from many different countries to make more money here than they would back home; even though they are making much less than any of us would doing the same jobs. They leave their families to make a life for themselves in our little town. I wonder sometimes how many of them actually send money back to their families and how long that lasts.

Some parts of the storyline I have a hard time imagining because of the amount of fear that the characters experience. In the town that the main character lives in, there are only women and children. All the children are boys, in reality there is only one boy. When they are born they are registered as boys so the girls don't draw attention to themselves. When they hear an SUV rolling down the road, the girls hide in holes in the ground to avoid being taken.

The story follows Ladydi, but there are so many other lives lived through the 212 pages.

Although the character is only sixteen years old, she experiences many situations that are not anything someone of her age should go through. I did have to stop myself with some of that thinking though. When a novel is based in a completely different country I often have to put my mind in a very different place in order to understand the characters situation. Many of the events that occurred in Ladydi's life were probably very normal for her. After all, she lived in a small town in Mexico.

Although I had a lot of trouble identifying with Ladydi's mother's character, I still enjoyed the way the novel transitioned through Ladydi's life; even though the back and forth from past to present got a little confusing sometimes.

 

Let it snow, this is t-bear signing off