A book review of Dead Girls, by Selva Almada
(Translated by Annie McDermott)
Author Selva Armada grew up in small-town Argentina and still remembers the stories of three young women, who were violently killed during her childhood in the early 1980s.
In this book, she recalls hearing of their deaths and sets out to investigate, uncovering other stories of violence against women along the way and exploring the role of gender violence in provincial Argentina during those years, when the country was celebrating a return to democracy.
This is a lyrical book that captures the day-to-day lives of women and girls in rural Argentina, evoking a sense of place and the community that exists there. It’s also a powerful and hard-hitting read that doesn’t flinch from some of the more brutal details of these stories. There were several times, particularly early in the book where Almada sets the tone, when I felt a cold hand take hold of my heart. It’s a feeling most women will be familiar with, a discomfort and sickness that comes with a story about a woman who has been raped and abused.
When it comes to sexual violence, women have an innate sense of vulnerability, an understanding that we can’t always protect ourselves from circumstance, from society or the people that live within it. These violent stories clearly haunted the author and her writing captures in abstract the sense that she could have been the victim of a similar crime, it is only chance that protected her.
The book is full of violence against women, but it’s not sensationalist. The victims are humanised, the circumstances of their lives explained dispassionately. Almada writes of her encounters with the victims’ relatives and friends, who are still struggling to come to terms with their unfinished stories years later. Often no arrests have been made, no perpetrator convicted. There are just rumours and memories, lives tarnished by association.
Dead Girls isn’t an easy read, but it’s an important one. It’s a book that will stay with me, like the women who live on in its pages, still waiting for justice.
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Dead Girls on Goodreads, Charco Press, Amazon and Hive
Please note: I received a complimentary copy of this book from Charco Press in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links.