"Maybe this is your mission: to gather the bones of these girls, piece them together, give them a voice and then let them run, free and unfettered, wherever they have to go."

Dead Girls is an interesting and unique piece of work as it crosses non-fiction, journalistic fiction, and crime genres and never settles on a single genre. Selva Almada combines her own research about the murder of these three girls with her personal experiences growing up as a woman. Dead Girls becomes much broader and bigger than just the murder of these three women though as Almada makes the reader consider much more broadly violence against women.

The book itself is split between chapters that each cover different themes as Almada talks to a variety of people in Argentina about femicide or specifically about the murdered girls. She then ties these broader discussions in with the deaths of the girls. I would say this can make the chapters feel a little disjointed at times and it does require your full concentration but it's also very clever.

For example in one chapter Almada states that 2/3 girls' relatives visited psychics following their murders. This is followed up with her own experiences of visiting a psychic for answers about the girls, her childhood experience with a local healer and her experience with a local gypsie community who came to town when she was a child. These experiences all chop and change at various points in the chapter so you do have to pay attention to the switch in time and experience. However what Almada does with these different aspects is construct an image of how women are both treated and how women behave in Argentina. In this chapter specifically, her personal anecdotes serve to impress upon the reader the value and power of local healers and psychics.

The addition of Almada's personal experiences serves to ground the reader with a greater understanding of femicide and violence against women in Argentina. It shows how violence against women continues to happen and how the abusers are often the justice system fails to capture or punish the perpetrators.

This book, like many that focus on journalism and crime, raises more questions than it answers. Almada talks to the friends and relatives of the girls, consults with a psychic, visits the various places, examines the media, the crime files and more to construct an understanding of what led to these girls murders. However, it's still clear that even with this research the answers remain aloof from Almada and it's unlikely that these women's stories will ever be known.

Ultimately Dead Girls serves as a voice to the countless women who have had their lives taken away by brutal acts of violence. Almada questions why these acts continue, how society enables them to go along, and questions whether these people will eventually receive justice. It raises a lot of questions and provides a lot to think about. A rather stark and tragic read in places, this book is quite haunting but incredibly important as we think about the number of women who have violent acts perpetrated against them.