{"id":8328,"date":"2020-03-25T13:25:08","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T17:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8328"},"modified":"2020-03-25T13:25:10","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T17:25:10","slug":"sabrina-corina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/25\/sabrina-corina\/","title":{"rendered":"Sabrina & Corina."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina<\/a> <\/em>is her first published volume, a slim collection of eleven stories about women of mixed Latina and indigenous ancestry grappling with identity, sexism, and cultural changes in the rapidly shifting landscape of Denver, the author’s hometown. The book was shortlisted for the National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise<\/em>) and the Story Prize (won by Everything Inside<\/em>) and made numerous year-end top ten lists for 2019, due, I assume, to its beautiful prose and the window it opens on to characters and subcultures that do not often appear in contemporary literary fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title story is told through the eyes of Corina,\nremembering her cousin Sabrina with whom she shared much of her childhood before\nthey grew apart as Sabrina became more licentious, and who has now been strangled\nby some unknown man months after the last time Corina saw her, the latest in a\nlong string of women in her family killed or harmed by men. That leads into\n“Sisters,” which jumps back a few decades to tell how Corina’s aunt\nwas blinded by a violent man \u2013 and how little people even seemed to care about\nwhat happened to her. “Tomi,” one of the standout stories in the\ncollection, is told by a woman who’s just coming home from prison to live with\nher brother and his son, the title character, as she tries to rebuild trust\nwith her family even as Tomi is struggling with his mom leaving the family, leading\nto a confrontation when Tomi tries to go see his mother across town. Every\nstory has some incident of death or another kind of loss, set against the backdrop\nof a city that marginalizes women of color in multiple ways \u2013 economically,\ngeographically, socially \u2013 and creates the conditions for these cycles to\nrepeat themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

I wouldn’t put this among the top contenders for this year’s\nliterary awards \u2013 at this point, the Pulitzer is really the only significant\none left \u2013 because there just isn’t enough here. The stories are great, without\na letdown in the collection, but there is a sameness across the volume that\nmade me want Fajardo-Anstine to stretch out beyond these themes and character\narchetypes. I assume she will do so as she grows as a writer, whether in more\nshort stories or in longer forms of fiction, but by the time I reached the\nfinal story, the plaintive “Ghost Sickness,” I realized how similar\nthe characters and settings had become over the course of the book. There’s a\ntenuous quality to the stories, especially their main characters, where I felt\nconnected to what was happening but not to the women at the centers of these events,\nand in nine or ten of the stories the protagonist might as well have been the\nsame person. It is a very promising debut effort, however, a bit like a rookie\nseason by someone you think is going to become a star in another year or two \u2013\njust not as well-developed a work as you’d expect of someone further in their\ncareer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’d set a goal for myself for 2019 to read ten works of literary fiction, and this marked the tenth such work I’ve read, which means I feel like I have read enough to rank them. This isn’t a Pulitzer prediction in any way, but a matter of personal preference. I wouldn’t be shocked to see something from this list win the award for fiction next month, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Bowlaway<\/a><\/em> by Elizabeth McCracken
2. The Nickel Boys<\/a><\/em> by Colson Whitehead
3. Feast Your Eyes<\/a><\/em> by Myla Goldberg
4. Trust Exercise<\/a><\/em> by Susan Choi
5. Everything Inside<\/a> <\/em>by Edwidge Danticat
6. Sabrina & Corina <\/em>by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
7. The Topeka School<\/a><\/em> by Ben Lerner
8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous<\/a><\/em> by Ocean Vuong
9. Exhalation<\/em> by Ted Chiang
10. Disappearing Earth<\/a><\/em> by Julia Phillips <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one 2019 work of fiction I haven’t read but plan to read\nwhen I can is Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House<\/em>. If something I haven’t\nread wins the Pulitzer, I’ll read that too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is her first published volume, a slim collection of eleven stories about women of mixed Latina and indigenous ancestry grappling with identity, sexism, and cultural changes in the rapidly shifting landscape of Denver, the author’s hometown. The book was shortlisted for the National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1161,317,865,260,275],"class_list":["post-8328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-books","tag-latino-american-literature","tag-native-american-literature","tag-rankings","tag-short-stories","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8328"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8331,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8328\/revisions\/8331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}