In debut novelist Dolores Reyes's Eartheater, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches, an unnamed, teenaged narrator is compelled to eat dirt after her mother's death. The habit inspires vivid and often violent visions of those whose blood has tainted the soil. After predicting where the decomposing corpse of her missing schoolteacher would be found, the protagonist begins to receive visits from grief-stricken relatives of missing peoples, desperate for a lead. The money she gets from providing these services helps support her and her older brother, alone in an Argentinian slum, but these episodes leave her traumatized and alienated. When a police officer takes an interest in both her and her abilities, the narrator takes an even deeper plunge into the adult world of desire, despair, sex and violence.
Crisp and haunted, Reyes's prose captures the interior life of a girl as she faces the immense passion and devastation of womanhood. Flippant yet evasive, the narrator's voice opposes any romantic or wistful notions of coming-of-age. Instead, she copes with the entangled traumas of gender and class, sex and death, power and submission through the deeply affective compulsion to consume the very earth that compresses and combines it all. Despite the metaphorical element of Eartheater's premise, the violence and emotional heft of the text is anything but figurative. The novel's physicality--its attention to taste, smell and texture--inspires in its readers the same frightening grip of desire and disgust that so entraps its protagonist. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor