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If I Die in Juárez (Camino Del Sol)
author: Stella Pope Duarte
name: Steev
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2008/08/01
date added: 2011/09/24
shelves: novels, own-it
review:
This is a novel based on the actual situation of the femicides in Ciudad Juarez. It follows 3 different young women whose lives connect with each other and with the out-of-control violence against women which that city is now famous for.
It's great that more and more people are addressing the issue, not just with journalism and documentaries but with fiction. Unfortunately Duarte's book is not that skillfully done, her prose being something like what one would find in young adult fiction, full of over-explanation and unconvincing narrative voices (by which I mean that as the point-of-view switches around, no matter which character is currently the narrator or 'center'for the story, they all, sadly, seem to have roughly the same internal monologue, comparable in style to a 7th grade social studies teacher giving a lecture to her students).
I don't mean to sound too harsh. It's an acceptable, 3-star book. It's just that, if I didn't already care about the issue the book looks at, I would have never read it. And that's a bad thing in cases like this - if awareness of a social issue like the Juarez femicides is to spread much further, it will most probably be via works that appeal to their audiences on their own merits, as a skillfully crafted, perhaps even very skillfully crafted, piece of culture. Those who consume it despite its weaknesses probably already know the facts. In this way, the book fails perhaps in a similar way to how Jennifer Lopez's film "Bordertown" did - it was just poorly done, and no amount of star appeal or good intentions about the topic could make up for it.
I hope that novelists who are more talented start to attack the topic, and I look forward to reading Robert Bolaño's "2666," when it comes out in English this November, that features a fictional city modeled on Juarez called Santa Teresa. And Bolaño is a (posthumously) rising, trendy star, but just imagine if writers like Stephen King or Neal Stephenson or Pynchon started writing novels about Juarez?