This story follows a journalist called Zoe as she investigates the murder of a trans woman called Paloma (a Muxe, technically a third gender, but in the context of the story a trans female interpretation makes the most sense) and meets a Curandera (a healer) called Feliciana.
Even though Paloma dies in the first sentence of the novel, she haunts the narrative and plays an incredibly important role in the story. As we get to know about Zoe's story, her home life, her sister's traumatic experience, her struggles to become a journalist we also learn about Feliciana's story, her small village, her sister's traumatic experience and her struggles to become accepted as a Curandera, a role normally only permitted to men. Besides being the reason the two women ever meet each other, Paloma plays a big role in Feliciana's growing up, but I still wish she had gotten to play a bit more of a role in the actual story.
This is an incredibly interesting book to read in translation, since many terms have been left in the original language as there are no fitting translations for them. The little preface by the translator helped set the mood for the story for me and was incredibly useful in following the story despite the to me unfamiliar terms.
The story is drenched in men's violence against women, through exclusion from certain fields of work, being judged as inherently less competent than men, features graphic sexual and domestic violence as well as murder and transmisogyny.
One thing I struggled with a bit is the very graphic description of sexual assault and csa in this novel. While I can appreciate a text that focusses on the way trauma causes you to get stuck, circling around a violent event the way the assault of Feliciana's sister here felt over the top graphic, particularly since the person who experienced it is not the person telling the story. I do not think this level of graphic description was necessary to really show how traumatic such an event can be, especially since once it was mentioned Feliciana did not return to it.
I also wish the stories had tied together a bit more closely, because while I enjoyed the parallels between them, it still felt a bit disjointed.
However, I really enjoyed the writing style and found the character studies presented here quite interesting and if you can handle graphic descriptions of assault you might enjoy it a bit more than I did.
TW: sexual assault, csa, graphic descriptions of rape, transphobia, transmisogyny, murder, violence, domestic violence