Slash and burn

Salvadoran writer Hernández mines the traumatic aftermath of an unnamed Latin American country's civil war for a wrenching story of three generations of women including an ex-guerrilla combatant and her four daughters, all unnamed. While fighting as a guerrilla in the mountains, the combatant becomes pregnant and is forced to give up her firstborn daughter for adoption. Decades after the war, the now ex-combatant searches for her daughter in France, where the daughter was raised by adoptive parents, leaving behind her three other daughters. One was raised primarily by the ex-combatant's mother, and the ex-combatant's feelings of guilt over the war, along with her resentment toward her own mother's neglect, eddy through the narrative of her search. While initially challenging, the series of nameless female narrators, nameless places, and indirect speech render a certain universality and anonymity to the characters, and, coupled with the crystalline descriptions of postwar devastation, the technique dramatically underscores the horrific context of Cold War--era civil wars in Latin America, from the ever-present threat of rape and murder by marauding soldiers during the conflict to the present-day tension and distrust. Multilayered and consistently engrossing, Hernández's knockout novel is not to be missed. (Jan.)

In an unnamed Central American country, a teenage girl fights a yearslong civil war during which she bears several daughters. When it's over, she struggles to find a way to shed the soldier and embrace the mother. The protagonist is nameless, referred to only as "she" or "her" or later "the mother"; the other characters, mostly female, are called "her mother," "her daughter," "her sister," "her aunt." The book feels both startlingly profound and, later, confusing as it drags on too long, with barely any dialogue to break up the text. The girl first learns to put a gun together at 13 when her father teaches her how to protect their family before he leaves to join "the catechists" in the war against the state. She soon decides to follow him to the mountains and takes up with a much older man there. When she has her first daughter, her commanders send the baby away, to be sold by nuns to a couple from Paris. Though the woman has two more daughters by her eventual husband from the war and another daughter by a different man after her husband's death, she never gives up on her firstborn and finally finds a way to her after the war's official end. Though there are no men in her life by now and she's the sole provider for her daughters, she's still on guard and following phantom orders. The mother, whose endless practicality, resilience, and independence are the backbone of the novel, cuts through the violence, poverty, and petty cruelties of the men and ex-combatants in her community to give her daughters their best chance. A story about a mother's resilience in a postwar country is let down by its sometimes impenetrable form. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.