NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands. “Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart.”—Sandra CisnerosWINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK … Cisneros
WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE STORY PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.
Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal
“Sabrina & Corina isn’t just good, it’s masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth.”—Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
“[A] powerhouse debut . . . stylistically superb, with crisp dialogue and unforgettable characters, Sabrina & Corina introduces an impressive new talent to American letters.”—Rigoberto González, NBC News
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Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart, believable in everything they said and did. How tragic that American letters hasn’t met these women of the West before, women who were here before America was America. And how tragic that these working-class women haven’t seen themselves in the pages of American lit before. Thank you for honoring their lives, Kali. I welcome them and you.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Story Collection Tells the Tales of Women, in Fractured Families, in a Gentrifying City
by Jenny Shank, High Country News
Many of the young female protagonists in Sabrina and Corina, Denver author Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s poised, rich debut story collection, grow up in fractured families—in which one parent leaves, dies or simply fails at the job. But these families’ roots run generations deep in Colorado, and a grandmother often brings stability through her staunch love and practical caregiving, offering simple remedies derived from a Mexican-American or indigenous heritage: garlic for warts, potato slices on temples for headaches, herbs instead of brain-addling fentanyl for the pain of cancer patients, and for “a cold or a broken heart … a warm cup of atole made only with blue corn.”
Although these women demonstrate abundant love, they are far from stereotypical or saccharine characters. One, armed with a gun, defends her home from an intruder, and all of them tell it like is. The grandmother in the title story says her granddaughter’s absentee father “was a nobody—some white guy with a name like a stuffy nose, Stuart or Randall.”
Fajardo-Anstine’s protagonists might struggle to pass their history exams or revert, for a night, to their youthful graffiti days, but they still feel grounded. They may not know exactly where they’re going, but they know who they are and where they belong as surely as they know the traditions that will mark each rite of passage. In the title story, Corina explains, “I had experienced enough Cordova deaths to know one pot was filled with green chili, another with pintos, and the last one with menudo. Deaths, weddings, birthdays—the menu was always the same.” They watch with a kind of astonishment as Denver gentrifies, and neighborhoods known for decades as the Westside or the Northside become the “Highlands.”
“Since the newcomers had started moving to Denver,” Fajardo-Anstine writes, “they’d changed the neighborhood names to fit their needs, to sound less dangerous, maybe less territorial.”
In many of these expertly crafted stories, there’s one woman whose life, or untimely death, serves as a cautionary tale. In the title story, Sabrina is strangled, and her cousin and former best friend, Corina, contemplates her short life and tragic death. Corina wonders why she escaped Sabrina’s fate; was it because she was not as pretty and therefore perhaps not as self-destructive or attractive to dangerous men? “These pretty girls,” the funeral director tells Corina, “they get themselves into such ugly situations.” Corina is determined to buck tradition rather than become yet another victim of the “line of tragedies” so many women in her family endured. “The stories always ended the same, only different girls died, and I didn’t want to hear them anymore,” she decides.
In the haunting “Sisters,” Fajardo-Anstine transports readers to Denver in 1955, where teenage sisters Doty and Tina Lucero live in a duplex off Federal Boulevard. They moved to the city from southern Colorado when their mother took up with an “older Anglo rancher” who gave the girls unwelcome attention. Now they are both working as receptionists, and Tina is determined to marry well to secure her future, while Doty “had no interest in men.” But at a time when men control most aspects of public life, pretty, Patsy Cline-loving Doty struggles to escape a persistent suitor.
In the affecting story “Tomi,” Nicole returns from La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, where she spent time for crashing her car through “an elderly couple’s picture window at four in the morning.” Nicole comes home to the Denver house her brother, Manny, inherited when their father died. Manny’s wife has left him, and his son, Tomi, is adrift—overweight, failing his reading class and spending all his time playing video games. Nicole, who years ago stole money meant for Tomi’s education, unexpectedly becomes a good influence on him, though her brother is the only person who believes she’s a decent person at heart.
In “Ghost Sickness,” Ana is trying to make a better life for herself but is in danger of failing her “History of the American West” class. “If she fails,” Fajardo-Anstine writes, “she’ll lose her scholarship, the displaced fund, given to the grandchildren of Denver residents, mostly Hispano, who once occupied the Westside neighborhood before it was plowed to make way for an urban campus.” Although historical facts elude Ana on the final, a Diné creation story her wayward boyfriend once told her saves the day.
In story after story, characters who are on the verge of slipping into the abyss are saved somehow, mainly by the profound pull of indestructible family ties and shared culture in the form of stories, rituals, and remedies. Wealthy newcomers may keep coming to Colorado, Sabrina and Corina suggests, but their money can’t buy the sense of heritage and interconnectedness shared by the Latino and Indigenous residents they’re displacing.
This piece originally appeared in High Country News. Jenny Shank’s short story collection, “Mixed Company,” won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in October 2021. Her novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and McSweeney’s. She is on the faculty of the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver.
Great writing – Kali Fajardo-Anstine knows how to create a sense of place and character with just a few paragraphs, and these short interconnected stories come to life. Loved that they’re all from the point of view of female characters, and that they’re all connected to a single family over generations. Extra cool was all of the Denver and Colorado settings, landmarks and commentary, being that I live in the city.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s collection of stories, Sabrina & Corina, isn’t just good, it’s masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. (Is this really her first book?) Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth. Comparisons came to mind: the Alice Munro of the high plains, the Toni Morrison of indigenous Latinas — but why compare her to anybody? She is her own unique voice, and her work will easily find a place, not just in Latinx literature but in American literature and beyond. Can you see me? I’m giving this collection a standing ovation! Can you hear me? I’m calling out Brava! Brava! to Kali Fajardo-Anstine from a new fan and aficionada of her work.
A terrific collection of stories — fiercely and beautifully made.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine writes about hard truths in women’s lives so knowingly, and with such a deft touch, I felt hyper-alert, as well as implicated and imperiled. The book is about belief, coping, yearning, and proceeding in spite of adversity (that is, the times we stay alive). The final act of the first story tells us everything we need to know about what territory we’ll be entering: In these achingly convincing stories, the writer is writing delicately, symbolically, about mortality itself.