SABRINA & CORINA

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.