Sabrina & Corina Stories

Review by New York Times Review

Having been taught from an early age that beauty and femininity attract harm, the women in these fierce and essential stories are never truly surprised by the brutality of the men around them. Friends, sisters and mothers are often implicated by their failures to protect the doomed women, who move inexorably toward their fates. When the young woman in "Sisters" is set up with the man who will eventually assault and maim her, she's immediately filled with dread. Menace permeates their first date: Missing-person fliers litter the drive-in; the man exhibits a cruel streak. "She couldn't place the emotion's origins within herself, but she watched carefully as Joey breathed with his mouth slightly open, spit shining across his square teeth." When her ambivalence toward him threatens to unmask a difficult truth, she conforms to her sister's wishes, also temporarily disengaging her survival instincts. In Fajardo-Anstine's collection, history always resurfaces, and the landscape mirrors the cycles at play in the characters' lives. After ancient skeletons are unearthed by neighborhood boys, a teenage girl's estranged mother returns to the family home. The girl enacts an erratic pattern of nurture and neglect upon the bag of sugar she is jointly parenting for a class assignment, whispering to it: "1 don't know if I'm very nice to you." In the title story, a cosmetician prepares her cousin's body for burial while tracing her descent into the grave alongside the decline of their friendship. They had once been so close they had argued about which of them had actually felt the pain of a bee sting in their shared earliest memory. As teenagers they had studied their reflections in the full-length mirrors hanging on the four walls of their grandmother's bathroom. "My grandmother believed every woman needed to know how she looked from any angle ... to know how the rest of the world viewed us." The image of the two girls observing themselves in their grandmother's mirrors, and hoping to emerge somehow as women in control of how the world perceives them, would seem to represent the feminine agency, legacy and kinship that govern the hearts of every character in this book.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]

---

Review by Booklist Review

Latina and Indigenous American women who long to be seen and see themselves are the beating heart of the stories in Fajardo-Anstine's rich and radiant debut. Many of their parents aren't around, and the pleas of their elders to go to church once in a while are mostly ignored, but they lean on one another. Dead or dying loved ones people many of these tales; the dazzling title story launches with woozy velocity as a makeup artist heeds her grandmother's wish that she beautify her dead cousin for funeral viewing. In Sugar Babies, a class assignment to parent a bag of sugar as if it's a human baby makes a girl question what she's inherited from her own young mother. After her release from prison, a woman tries to stop messing up and earns the respect of her young nephew in Tomi. Galapago finds a woman, forced by crime to leave her longtime home in a gentrifying neighborhood, feeling ashamed that even in her old age, she wanted to live more than die. Sharing her characters' southern Colorado homelands, Fajardo-Anstine imbues her stories with a strong sense of place and the infinite unseen generations that coexist in even single moments.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Fajardo-Anstine's beautiful debut collection, set largely in Denver, Colo., she dexterously explores what it means to be Latina, indigenous, and female in ways both touching and powerful. In "Sugar Babies," readers meet sixth grader Sierra, who grows uncomfortable in her home economics class when she is forced to partner with a male student and care for a infant bag of sugar--a "sugar baby." With a mother who keeps leaving her and her father, Sierra emotionally breaks down when her sugar baby dies, exposing years of pent up anger and grief at her lost mother. In the title story, Corina struggles with the murder of her cousin at the hands of her latest abusive boyfriend, as she, a new cosmetology student, agrees to prepare the body for the family funeral. Fajardo-Anstine's women also contend with racism, sexism, and loss of cultural identity. In "Sisters," Doty wants more than just to become a white man's "little Spanish girl" like her sister aspires to be, choosing instead to explore her attraction to women. In "Ghost Sickness," a college student, Ana, struggles in a history course that has overwritten the original Navajo and Pueblo people's history with the history of white, European conquest. These stories are stirring meditations on the lives of Latinas of indigenous ancestry; Fajardo-Anstine's collection is vividly alive with the love and pain of its characters, while echoing with the spiritual power of their pasts. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

Eleven achingly realistic stories set in Denver and southern Colorado bear witness to the lives of Latina women of Indigenous descent trying to survive generations of poverty, racism, addiction, and violence."Ever feel like the land is swallowing you whole, Sierra?" the narrator's mother, Josie, asks her in "Sugar Babies," the first story of Fajardo-Anstine's debut collection. "That all this beauty is wrapped around you so tight it's like being in a rattlesnake's mouth?" Here, it's becoming a mother at 16 that threatens to swallow Josie, prompting her to abandon 10-year-old Sierra. In "Sabrina Corina," which follows two cousins, women's lack of opportunities and their dependence on men undo Sabrina, a blue-eyed, dark-haired beauty. While Corina, the plainer of the two, goes to beauty school, Sabrina spirals into substance abuse and sleeps around. She's murdered at the story's start, and Corina has the horrible task of going to the mortuary to do her cousin's makeup, literally covering up the violence she suffered. In "Julian Plaza," gaping holes in our social safety net ensnare the characters. When Nayeli gets breast cancer, her family has no good choices: Her husband's health insurance won't cover effective treatments, and he can't care for her for fear of being canned. Fajardo-Anstine writes with a keen understanding of the power of love even when it's shot through with imperfections. Nayeli's young daughters try to carry their mother home from the neighbor's where she has been sent to die. And Sierra from the title story still fantasizes about her mother returning at some point, "joyously waving to me, her last stop."Fajardo-Anstine takes aim at our country's social injustices and ills without succumbing to pessimism. The result is a nearly perfect collection of stories that is emotionally wrenching but never without glimmers of resistance and hope. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

Chapter 1 Sugar Babies Though the southern Colorado soil was normally hard and cakey, it had snowed and then rained an unusual amount that spring. Some of the boys in my eighth-grade class decided it was the perfect ground for playing army. They borrowed shovels and picks from their fathers' sheds, placing the tools on their bicycle handlebars and riding out to the western edge of our town, Saguarita, a place where the land with its silken fibers of swaying grass resembled a sleeping woman with her face pressed firmly to the pillow, a golden blonde by day, a raven-haired beauty by night. The first boy to hit bone was Robbie Martinez. He did so with the blunt edge of a rusted shovel. Out of the recently drenched earth, he lifted a piece of brittle faded whiteness and tossed it downwind like nothing more than a scrap of paper. "Look," he said, kneeling as if he was praying. "Everybody come look." The other boys gathered around. There in the ground lay broken pieces of bowls with black zigzagging designs. Next to those broken bowls were human teeth, scattered like dried kernels of yellow corn. Above them the sun had begun to fade behind the tallest peak of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The sky was pale and bleak, like the bloated belly of a lizard passing above. "Don't touch it," Robbie said. "None of it. We need to tell somebody." And tell they did. The entire town. Everyone, it seemed, was a witness. Days after their discovery, our final eighth-grade project was announced. We gathered in the gym for an assembly. The teachers brought together the boys from technical education class and the girls from home economics. We sat Indian style in ten rows beneath dangling ropes and resting basketball hoops. The room smelled like a tennis ball dipped in old socks and the cement walls were padded in purple vinyl--supposedly to minimize dodgeball injuries. I thought it looked like a loony bin. Mrs. Sharply, a bug-eyed woman with a neck like a giraffe's but a torso like a rhino's, stood before us on a wooden box. "For the remaining two weeks of your junior high career," she said, "you will care for another life." She then reached behind her into a paper grocery bag, revealing a sack of C & H pure cane sugar. "Sugar babies. We will be raising our very own sugar babies." Older kids had gossiped about notorious school projects. We had heard stories of piglet dissections, the infamous "growing and changing" unit, rocket launches with carbon dioxide canisters, and a cow's lung blackened and doused in cigarette smoke, but no one had warned us about this. "Sugar babies are a lot of responsibility," Mrs. Sharply said as she stepped down from her box and paced with the sugar sack. She explained we were to be graded on skills like feeding, bonding, budgeting, and more. She then passed around diaper directions. "We do it all alone?" It was Solana Segura. She was behind me, her perpetual whimper causing every sentence to end like a little howl. "Like single moms and stuff?" Somewhere, down the rows, a boy croaked, "But the DNA shows I am not the father." We chirped with laughter until Mrs. Sharply held up two fingers, signaling silence. "Of course not. You'll be in committed partnerships. We're drawing names." A teacher's aide in Payless flats scurried like a magician's assistant toward Mrs. Sharply. She carried two Folgers cans decorated in pink and blue glitter. Mrs. Sharply set down her sugar, taking the cans from the aide and giving each a good shake. From the pink can, the first name she pulled was Mimi Yazzie, who stood and slinked forward, burying her face into her arms as Mrs. Sharply called out her partner, Mike Ramos. This cycle of humiliation lasted for several more rounds before I was partnered with Roberto Martinez, the bone boy. After school, Robbie and I sat outside on the swings. He was a scrawny kid with frequently chapped lips and a light dusting of freckles across his low nose. He played soccer and always wore a beat-up blue windbreaker and knockoff Adidas sneakers, with four stripes instead of three. The sugar baby was planted snug in his lap, balanced ever so gently between his two stick-arms. His dark eyes were so big and wide they resembled two brown pigeon eggs and he spoke with a quavering, squeaky voice. "They said we have to name it. Do you want to pick it out, Sierra?" "No, you name it." I swung up. "And you take it home tonight." I swung down. "I'll watch it tomorrow, but only if I have to." "That's cool," he said. "What about Miranda? That's my grandma's name." "Whatever," I sighed, leaning back on the swing. "Name it after your grandmother. Name it after your entire family. I don't care." I pumped until the rusted chain pulled taut. Then I jumped, landing in the mushy gravel with both feet. I took off for home. Excerpted from Sabrina and Corina: Stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---