Goodreads Monday: Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Goodreads Monday is a really simple weekly meme hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners where you choose a book at random from your Goodreads TBR and explain why you want to read it.

This week’s pick is: Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

The Blurb:

A haunting debut story collection on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands, centered on Latinas of indigenous ancestry that shines a new light on the American West.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit. Set against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado–a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite–these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home. 

Why do I want to read it?

• I feel like this book may break my heart in places but I really want to stretch myself to read beyond YA and rom-coms.
• While out of my usual comfort zone …it is still kind of in the realm of my interests – stories about women….about friendships and about the relationships between mothers and daughters.
• I don’t pretend to know anything about indigenous Latinas heritage, about Latina culture or way of life but I am fascinated by this book’s content and can’t wait for it to arrive in the post.