BOOKS I READ: Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement (2014). Ladydi Garcia Martínez lives in a mountainous town of mostly women. The men have left for the U.S. for better jobs or to escape the reach of the cartels and police. Ladydi and her friends, Maria, Paula, and Estefani, are passed off as boys. Their hair is cropped short, and they’re made to look ugly. Anything to avoid the attention of the men in SUVs with tinted windows who come to steal the attractive girls. The mothers also dig hiding holes for the girls, shelter for when the SUV caravan approaches. They all worry about Paula, who is strikingly beautiful. Word of her beauty is certain to be carried by the wind, and it’s only a matter of time before the SUVs come for her.

Ladydi’s mother is a kleptomaniac who drinks beer incessantly. The empties a mound of bottles outside their home. The mother longs for her husband’s return, or, at least, for the money he promised to send down. The girls go to school if their assigned teacher comes from Mexico City to fulfill their one-year social requirement. After Ladydi finishes elementary school, Maria’s brother hooks her up with a job in Acapulco. It’s a live-in housecleaning job and he offers to drive her there when her start day comes. A detour on the way to the resort city changes her life forever.

In Prayers for the Stolen, Jennifer Clement depicts a broken Mexican society, deeply corrupted by money and the violence endemic of the drug trade. The girls are the innocents caught in the middle. It is a dark tale that seems to have no bottom to the abyss.

Prayers for the Stolen was made into a movie in 2021, but it only has passing resemblance to the novel, and covers only the first of three parts of the book. Unfortunately, the final two parts of the book are eventful, and omitting them adds to the letdown. In the novel, the characters are richer, with more depth to their blemishes and heroism; the sense of foreboding is thicker; and the wanton violence is closer to the surface. One other minor disappointment is that the movie doesn’t use Ladydi, an inspired name choice for the protagonist. She is named Ana in the movie.

Book cover for Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement (2014).

Pick up a copy of Prayers for the Stolen at my Bookshop.org affiliate stand. Check out my reading-log. The previous entry was:

BOOKS I READ: Crossing State Lines: An American Renga edited by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes…