![]() ![]() ![]() The entire town follows this practice, announcing every birth as a boy and trying to make the girls less attractive by such tactics as rubbing chili powder on their skin to make it red-as Ladydi’s friend Paula’s mother does-and keeping their hair short. When she got older, she tried to conceal the child’s beauty and “rubbed a yellow or black marker over the white enamel” on her teeth to make them “look rotten” (4). As such, to protect Ladydi, when she was born, her mother told everyone that she was a boy and dressed her accordingly. Prayers for the Stolen is as harrowing as you would expect, but it’s also beguiling, and even. Ladydi explains that the drug traffickers who dominate the area kidnap local girls and hold them hostage to rape them and traffic them to other men. But Clement has produced a novel that is not a work of verisimilitude, but something else. ![]() Ladydi’s father, who was a waiter in the same city, emigrated to the United States, where he remained permanently after returning to visit them only a few times. She lives with her mother, Rita, a kleptomaniac and cleaner for a rich family in the nearby city of Acapulco. She currently lives in Mexico City and is President of PEN Mexico. ![]() She was awarded the NEA Fellowship for Literature for Prayers For The Stolen, which will be her first novel published in the United States. Ladydi Garcia Martinez, the narrator and protagonist of Prayers for the Stolen, describes her life growing up in the rural mountain village of Chulavista in Guerrero, Mexico. Jennifer Clement has studied literature in New York and Paris. ![]()
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