Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner)
A Sister's Search for Justice
1 of 2 copies available
“Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza’s chronicle is both personal and political.”—The Washington Post
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, She Reads, Electric Lit
October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the outcome—of that quest .
In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her sister’s history, depicting everything from Liliana’s early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.
Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence—handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana’s loved ones—to document her sister’s life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today.
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Creators
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Release date
February 28, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593663189
- File size: 246087 KB
- Duration: 08:32:40
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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December 12, 2022
In this gut-wrenching blend of memoir and reportage, Rivera Garza (No One Will See Me Cry), a Hispanic studies professor at the University of Houston, investigates her younger sister Liliana’s 1990 murder by an abusive ex-boyfriend, who remains at large. Placing her sister’s death in the context of the femicide crisis in Mexico, Rivera Garza interweaves startling facts and statistics (an average of 10 women are killed per day in Mexico) with lyrical meditations on her family life and Liliania’s efforts to break away from her obsessive high school boyfriend, Ángel González Ramos. Liliana’s oft-repeated desire not to be left alone haunts the narrative, as do Rivera Garza’s guilt and shame over her sister’s death. Documenting the meticulous detective work of recreating the years and months leading up to Liliana’s murder, Rivera Garcia interweaves case files and newspaper accounts with excerpts from Liliana’s teenage diary, where the early warning signs about Ángel appear. Thoughout, Rivera Garza laments how she and Liliana’s friends lacked “the insight, the language, that would allow us to identify the signs of danger,” and explores “how patriarchy deforms and hurts men, as much as it does women.” This piercing remembrance hits home. -
June 10, 2024
In 1990, Rivera Garza's sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico City. Years later, novelist Rivera Garza (The Taiga Syndrome) attempts to reconstruct Liliana's life and understand what led to her death. She combs through school notebooks, interviews friends, collects newspaper articles, and seeks out the places where her sister lived and played. She also braves the Mexican bureaucracy to access the complete police file about the murder. Rivera Garza ties Liliana's death to the upward trend of femicide in Mexico; as was the case with Liliana's murder, most women's deaths are unsolved. The author believes that Liliana was most likely killed by her abusive high school boyfriend, �ngel Gonz�lez Ramos. Liliana tried to leave him many times, but he would not let her go. In the aftermath of her death, he disappeared. While Rivera Garza does not find justice for her sister, she finds solace in bringing her story into the light. Narrator Victoria Villarreal gives a straightforward rendition of the prose while painting a lyrical picture of Liliana. Although Villarreal's performance is excellent, the story's shifting points of view are occasionally difficult to follow in audio. VERDICT A haunting and courageous book and an urgent call to speak out about violence against women.--Joanna M. Burkhardt
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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