The greatest dread is of the narcos themselves, who show up in their black Escapades to kidnap whichever girl catches their eye.
Nearby poppy fields draw army helicopters carrying herbicide, but since the soldiers are in cahoots with the narcos they drop their poison elsewhere, drenching those who happen to be outside. Their community is rent in two by a tourists’ highway, on which speeding cars now and then collide with their animals and their grandmothers. Life would be hard enough amid the scorpions, black widows, snakes and red ants, in a climate so hot that pillows are kept in refrigerators, but this is one of the many corners of Mexico where the rural poor are afflicted by those who have and want more. She shares a dirt-floor hut with her embittered, hard-drinking mother, who named her after the British princess not out of admiration or aspiration but to assert that all men fail their women. Hers is a village without men coming of age they leave to be gardeners in the United States or hitmen with the cartels, and they rarely come back.
Ladydi lives on a hardscrabble mountain slope outside glitzy Acapulco. But what of those victims whose experience of violence is less bloody and more routine? We seldom hear their voices, even less if they are teenaged girls. (Feb.When we count the cost of Mexico’s drug wars, we think first of the number of dead and next of the bereaved. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. Clement treats the brutal material honestly but not sensationally, conveying the harshest moments secondhand rather than directly, and ultimately allows Ladydi to continue to hope. Ladydi, thinking to save herself from Paula’s fate, decides to accept an offer of work from Mike, her best friend Maria’s brother, as a nanny in Acapulco, where, as he tells her, “people are rich, rich, rich.” However, Ladydi soon discovers that in a corrupt system, any apparent opportunity comes with hidden traps. The community is shocked when one kidnapped girl-the transcendently beautiful, now near-catatonic Paula-manages to return. Most of the men from Ladydi’s village left a long time ago. Ladydi, named after Princess Diana, spends her childhood dressed as a boy, as do all the girls from her village, since they will otherwise be kidnapped and forced into prostitution or drug smuggling. Despite its social significance, the book doesn’t read like homework Clement is more a poet than a documentarian, and the girls and women of the village she chronicles are complex individuals.
is an expose of the hideously dangerous lives girls lead in the Mexican state of Guerrero. The first novel from the American-born but Mexico-based Clement, president of PEN Mexico, to be published in the U.S.
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