Prayers for the Stolen ~ A Book Review

This book definitely grabs your attention from the first page. When Ladydi's mother is trying to make her ugly and make her look like a boy I knew this book was going to have me hooked. I wasn't wrong in my prediction as it was an extremely hard book to put down, and it was riveting. Just when I thought there was going to be a part that would drag or be something I would predict I was wrong.
Ladydi lives alone with her mother in a two room house with dirt floors. There are deadly scorpions, tarantulas, giant red and black ants, poisonous snakes, etc that are a part of their everyday lives. They eat very little and have very little. What they have has either come stolen or as gifts. Work is hard to find, and being out in the public eye is even harder. Ladydi lives on a mountain in Mexico where girls are to be hidden or else they will be taken. From birth until they can't hide it anymore these girls are made as ugly as possible and made to look like boys. Mothers dig holes in the ground and cover them with leaves so when the drug traffickers come to steal a girl to sell the girls can hide in a hole in the ground and perhaps have more of a chance to be saved.
This is a world where prostitution, kidnapping, murder, and drugs is a part of their everyday lives. Nobody blinks an eye to find a dead man in the desert, nobody asks questions when they stumble upon a drug field, and everyone knows better than to call the police when a drug trafficker comes knocking on their door armed with guns searching for a pretty girl to take and sell.
It is extremely heartbreaking to read such stories, but it's a reality in this world all over that such things do exist. If you do your research it's a serious issue that has gone on for years.
This book puts these issues in a story from a perspective of a young girl growing up in such a lifestyle. In Ladydi's world you will experience all of these and more. But this book is also heartbreaking and I wish I could have learned more about what happened to the characters later on to see how some of them ended up. I also wish some more information on big events would have been given in the book to understand some things a little better.
I still think this is a powerful, brutally honest, eye-opening read and I definitely recommend it.



::This book is available in::
Paperback   Hardcover   Kindle   Nook

::Product Details::

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Hogarth (November 4, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080413880X
• ISBN-13: 978-0804138802
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::About the author::

Jennifer Clement studied English Literature and Anthropology at New York University and also studied French literature in Paris, France. She has an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.

Clement is the author of the cult classic memoir Widow Basquiat (on the painter Jean Michel Basquiat) and two novels: A True Story Based on Lies, which was a finalist in the Orange Prize for Fiction, and The Poison That Fascinates.

She is also the author of several books of poetry: The Next Stranger (with an introduction by W.S. Merwin); Newton's Sailor; Lady of the Broom and Jennifer Clement: New and Selected Poems. Her prize-winning story A Salamander-Child is published as an art book with work by the Mexican painter Gustavo Monroy.

Jennifer Clement was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Fellowship for Literature 2012. She is also the recipient of the UK's Canongate Prize. In 2007, she received a MacDowell Fellowship and the MacDowell Colony named her the Robert and Stephanie Olmsted Fellow for 2007-08. Clement is a member of Mexico's prestigious "Sistema Nacional de Creadores."

Jennifer Clement was President of PEN Mexico from 2009 to 2012. She lives in Mexico City, Mexico and, along with her sister Barbara Sibley, is the founder and director The San Miguel Poetry Week.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this book, as a Blogging for Books member, in exchange for my unbiased review. All opinions expressed are solely my own.