Prayers for the Stolen

I don’t like to use direct quotes in my reviews, but it will be hard to resist in this case. (By the way, no quotations marks are used to set apart the dialogue.) As I was reading, I highlighted so many phrases that express so much about a country, a culture, a people, in a single thought. Maybe one that best sums up the mountains near Acapulco is: “In this land one can go out for a walk and find a huge iguana, a papaya tree covered with dozens of large fruits, an enormous anthill, marijuana plants, poppies, or a corpse.” The voice of Ladydi (you have to read to learn why she has that name) is direct and somehow simple – the tone of a child who has grown up seeing things a child shouldn’t see. Her perspective after all is of a very young (sixteen-year-old) person, not knowing what will happen in the future.