Mexican writer Brenda Lozano and translator Heather Cleary reunite after Witches for Mothers, about two women bound together by their temporarily overlapping motherhoods. On January 22, 1946, in Mexico City's wealthy Colonia Juárez, Gloria Felipe leaves her two-year-old daughter, Gloria Miranda Felipe, for 16 minutes to play with a new neighbor in their apartment building's courtyard, and the child vanishes. In nearby Colonia Guerrero, Nuria Valencia, who "had been trying for years to get pregnant with her husband, Martín Fernández Mendía," has just adopted a two-year-old child they've named Agustina after Martín's mother. For seven months and three weeks, Gloria becomes too incapacitated to mother--"I want to be kidnapped so you'll pay attention to me," one of her four other children poignantly begs. For seven months and three weeks, Nuria basks in mothering Agustina while Martín will marvel at the ease of being "a good father."
What might initially seem familiar, even predictable, is spectacularly offset by Lozano's sly narrator: "I wouldn't want you thinking I was some male omniscient narrator," she starts. Her paragraph-long self-introduction is an utter marvel, so succinct, erudite, demanding: "I'm not... the voice of a white male saying this is like this and that is like that and these characters are going to say blah-blah... and don't think I'm some generic woman, either: I'm Mexican, which means my words dance the jarabe tapatío; don't expect me to talk like a Miami anchorwoman." Lozano brilliantly interrogates parenthood, sexist medicine, desensitizing entitlement, and women's independence--exposing various versions to every story. --Terry Hong