Hogarth Press
Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A Sister's Search for Justice
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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - "A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister's murderer to justice years after the fact" (The Boston Globe), from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem).
"Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza's chronicle is both personal and political."--The Washington Post
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, She Reads, Electric Lit
October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. "My name is Cristina Rivera Garza," she writes in her request to the attorney general, "and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990." It's been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana's Invincible Summer is the account--and the outcome--of that quest .
In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her sister's history, depicting everything from Liliana's early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.
Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence--handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana's loved ones--to document her sister's life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.
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Book Details
ISBN:
9780593244111
EAN:
9780593244111
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
320
Authors:
Cristina Rivera Garza
Publisher:
Hogarth Press
Published Date: 2024-12-03
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This book was unexpected. I couldn't tell where it was going, and after reading about half, gave up and looked for reviews. After all, it had won the Pulitzer Prize, so it must be good. What was I missing? The reviews discussed the book's unusual-what? Would you call it structure?- that I likened to a new genre, much as IN COLD BLOOD had been, this part memoir, part feminist essay, part diary, part investigation, mostly presented as what it was. This was a survey of whatever she could find about her sister, but we, the readers, are the investigators. Our job is to grow to know Liliana and understand what happened to her, how and why she died. With that, I let the content wash over me without trying to make narrative sense of it and was flooded with the sense of the experience.
I thought this would be a typical who done it, focusing on the ineptitude of Mexican bureaucracy but it turned out to be a lyrical accounting of grief.
Beautifully written I loved it
The prose is gorgeous and its rhythm not unlike the experience of grief where a joyful memory arrives in one moment and a harrowing reminder of our loss drops us to our knees in the next breath. Don't let the subject matter dissuade you from buying and reading this book. It's a powerful and astonishing testament of love. As I read, I kept thinking that it was an incredible honor to accompany the author on her journey to justice for her beloved sister and for the other women victims of femicide.
I almost quit reading this book at the 30% mark but I decided to trudge through the rest of it and finish it. That’s a decision I definitely regret. Just my opinion I know, but it was absolute torture getting through this book. I was expecting more of a crime story; the sister investigating the murder of her sister many years ago. Instead, this was mostly a book that contained writing from Liliana’s journals that just went on and on and on and on. Ugh! I know for the author, this was a release for her and a way of her remembering her sister. For the reader, however, most of it was painful to get through. A lot of the journal writing is just weird and simply not interesting. I kept thinking, get to the point!! I don’t get the great reviews and the Pulitzer Prize, but to each his own I guess. It was one of the worst books I’ve read in a long time. I really wish I could get my money back (and even more so my time back!) that I invested on this one.
