Sabrina & Corina is a collection of 10 short stories primarily about Latinx women in the Denver area. It is rather bleak, full of poverty and violence and more specifically near Saguarita, a place where the land with its silken fibers of swaying grass resembled a sleeping woman with her face pressed firmly to the pillow, a golden blonde by day, a raven-haired beauty by night. as described at the beginning of the first story, 'Sugar Babies'. Each story has good description (Above us the ceiling f...

Kali Fajardo-Anstine's words are magic. Sabrina & Corina stories are atmospheric and raw, penetrating straight to your core. The details are exquisite, the emotions are palpable. A true time stopper. My BOOKSTAGRAM

There are times when we open a book and its undiscovered terrain. The social construct we live in doesn't always apply to the story we are entering so we have to come in with an open mind. In this book, Kali Fajardo-Anstine takes certain elements and amplifies it to the point were we grow weary of the terror, the evil, and all of the harm done against the women that we encounter. I think it was meant to be written that way. Sometimes the stories and the settings are the same but the impact they

Rating: 3.5/5.0Genre:Contemporary + Cultural + Short Stories National Book Award Nominee for Fiction (2019) This is the first book I read among those nominated for the National Book Award in 2019, I hope to get around and read the rest as well. Sabrina & Corina is a book of short stories where stories revolve around Latina women who live in Colorado. All the stories share the same element which is struggles. These women face lots of challenges in their life due to different factors be it, viol...

This collection blew me away. Each story here is centered on the experiences of Latinas of indigenous descent in and around Denver. Fajardo-Anstine brings her readers so close to her characters – their desires, their fears, their families, their histories – that we feel like we're inside their bodies and minds. SABRINA & CORINA is deeply intimate, profoundly beautifully written, so surprisingly and flawlessly plotted that each turn of the page is a revelation. I can't stop thinking about it. I c...

4.5 starsThis was a brilliantly crafted collection. They are stories that were strongly themed and tied together, by location, by the Indigenous and Latinx women who populated each story, and by the themes of things that bind these women and these communities together. Still, each story felt distinct and almost all of them felt full. There were times that Farjardo-Anstine built you up to the height of an emotion and left you there, but it only increased the haunting feeling of her collection. I

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | |3 ½ stars Sabrina & Corina is a touching collection of short stories. In these 11 stories Kali Fajardo-Anstine depicts the lives and experiences of Latinas in the United States (mainly in Denver, Colorado). Their everyday realities are marked by many social injustices: poverty, racism, sexism, addiction, parental neglect, emotional and physical abuse. While Fajardo-Anstine doesn't shy away from portraying their bleak circumstances, the stories never felt pessimisti...

3.5+ star.There is a depth of sadness in these stories, lightened at times by connections with others or by a slight acknowledgement or recognition that maybe there is a way forward. Children, mostly young girls, being left behind by their mothers and sometimes their fathers by death, by being left willfully, or by abandonment even before they have left is a recurring theme in a number of these stories. They all take place in or around Denver, Colorado where Latina women struggle with physical v...

National Book Award Longlist 2019. Fajardo-Anstine’s collection of short stories featuring Latinx and native women are bittersweet. There are themes of love, abandonment, betrayal, abuse, friendship, and mother-daughter relationships.A parenting class project in ‘Sugar Babies’ has one of them reflecting on her own parents’ abandonment and neglect. In ‘Sabrina & Corina’, Corina’s grandmother insists that she use her make-up skills to obscure the strangle marks on Corina’s cousin’s neck so that th...

"time didn't feel as long or wasteful in the company of another woman."kali fajardo-anstine's ability to capture the quilt of indigenous lives scattered across the southwest, the instability of mestizaje—an identity constantly in flux—and the ever-shifting cultural allegiances that plague communities at war with colonialism is brilliant. in this stunning collection of short stories, grief is slow to seep in, knife-like, a kind of reverse nostalgia: longing for a future that does not yet exist. a...

Thank you One World for a complimentary copy. I voluntarily reviewed this book. All opinions expressed are my own. I love the cover art. It's gorgeous and eye catching. This collection of short stories, Sabrina and Corina, centers around female, Latina indegiounous life and culture within the vicinity of Denver, Colorado.

Time to read is hard to come by lately (time to do anything is hard to come by lately) and I’ve turned to short stories to fill those small stolen moments. Sabrina & Corina has been my companion during the twenty minutes I have to myself each evening while my husband is putting my daughter to bed. And while most nights I am eager to hear his footsteps coming down the stairs, lately I keep hoping it’s really just the dog coming down so I have more time to finish the story I’m reading. These are s...

A collection of stories centered around Native and Hispanic women in Colorado, particularly the Denver area. All the different relationships between women within a family are explored - grandmother, mothers, sisters, cousins. Themes include absent mothers, poverty, gentrification, and the ways women can hurt themselves and others through their relationships. I wanted more variation in the stories, but still a solid collection.

An often dark yet overall moving short story collection that centers Latinas living in Denver, Colorado. These women’s experiences are diverse, though common themes run throughout the collection, including familial and domestic violence, what happens when people we love change, and the culture and resilience of Latinas. Each story felt distinct and important yet also blended well together, to form a collection about working-class women whose experiences are often ignored in the landscape of Amer...

Some excellent, sadly memorable stories.

More detailed review to come!Update 3/4/20:Average rating: 3.72/5Final rating: 3.5/5I felt so all over the place with this collection, and I think ultimately my biggest takeaway is that this was sad to read. Not that it was badly written - it emphatically was not - but there is so much sadness here that it is ingrained in every single world, and I sometimes find that difficult to read. My mental health only allows for so much sadness before I'm desperate for any small amount of joy, and I think

This book of short stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine (and from the Tournament of Books longlist) focuses on the lives of Latina and/or indigenous women living in an area of Denver. Families, traditions, and violence are important themes. This is an ownvoices collection, which is important all the time, but definitely lately. Highly recommended!

This short story collection about Indigenous Latina women living in Colorado and bound by family, tradition, trauma, mental illness, and a lot of death. It was a good book, and it touched on a lot of important topics. I appreciated the way that absence and abandonment was explored in so many narratives. The common experiences of the various women felt real and connected. Family loomed large in this book. It was palpable. But. The format. I felt with every new story, that I had to start over gett...

The cycles of violence against women in these stories broke me. But Kali Fajardo-Anstine has a way in her writing to make you want to read me. I really wish this was a novel, I was so invested in the characters and plot that I read the book twice (only 200pgs). This collection of short stories is ugly yet beautiful. A moving narrative on the life of Indigenous Latina women; Sabrina & Corina is a must read. Thank you, NetGalley & Random House, (One world Publishing) for the e-copy in exchange for...

A beautiful short story collection. I do wish some of the stories were longer because each time I connected with a character and wanted to learn more about them, the story ended 😩