Sabrina & Corina
Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Photo by Estevan Ruiz

The American West and Colorado serve as the backdrop for this engrossing collection of tales about Latinx & native women preserving in the face of despair. 

The title story, Sabrina & Corina, revolves around a young woman doing the makeup on the body of a cousin for her wake and open casket funeral because her neck was so badly strangled by her significant other. In Sisters, set in the 1950's, a woman has a violent encounter after saying "no" to lovemaking after a date, and then weeps weeks later when her sibling accepts a marriage proposal to the offender's buddy. 

Denver offers no escape, with a wave of gentrification displacing families. Even the small town of Saguarito, the setting for a few tales, combines the "everybody knows too much" oppressive feeling of a local community with the revelation of an unknown cemetery under a field where children were playing. Fajardo-Anstine skillfully weaves in aspects of Latinx identity - Spanish terms, attire, cooking - with bursts of knowledge about the prejudices and discrimination that stalked the Old West and still linger to this day. 

Stories that bravely reinvent the Wild West narrative by lifting up Latinx women and portraying callused hand cowboys not as heroes, but as villains and perpetrators of violence. 

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is from Denver, Colorado. Her fiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Boston Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Idaho Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. Kali has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and Hedgebrook.

Sabrina & Corina is publication by One World / Random House. Click here to purchase.

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Reviewed by
Elliott Turner​
​4/8/2019

Elliott Turner is the author of The Night of the Virgin, one of "the top ten fiction books of 2017" according to TheLatinoAuthor.com. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Atticus Reviews, VICE, Fusion, SplitLip Mag, and Transect Magazine.

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