When Nina's ex-husband takes their teenage daughter across the border into the US without her, Nina must fight her way from Brazil to Houston to get her back, all while the wreckage of Venezuela's collapsed revolution follows the family across every border they cross. Told through the fractured, overlapping voices of three generations, it's a story about the impossible math of protecting your child when your country has already failed you.
My Review
This book follows Nina, a Venezuelan mother cleaning houses in Porto Alegre, Brazil, who gets a text that her ex, Camilo, has taken their thirteen-year-old daughter Elisa across the border into the US. What follows is a chase across borders and grief, narrated in pieces by Nina, Elisa, Camilo, grandmother Graciela, and even Nina’s dead father Raúl, who talks from the grave with the same urgency as everyone still living.
I almost put this one down before Camilo entered the story properly. The opening chapters jump between voices with no warning, and Nina’s sections in particular run long and breathless, dialogue folded into paragraphs with no quotation marks, sentences that spiral like she’s narrating and interrogating and overhearing all at once. It took real effort to settle into that rhythm, and for a while I wasn’t sure the payoff would be worth it.
It was, mostly. Once the book slows down enough to explain how Nina and Camilo fell apart, their anger toward each other stops feeling abstract and starts feeling earned. The Venezuelan backdrop, the blackouts, the grocery runs that cost 220 times minimum wage, the slow rot of a revolution that ate its own promises, gives the family’s unraveling real weight. Morán folds in Spanish and Portuguese freely, which I loved even where I had to sit with not fully understanding.
Still, for a short book, it dragged more than it should have. I’d recommend it to readers drawn to fractured family narratives and migration stories, but go in prepared to be patient with the structure before it earns your trust.
Thank you to Knopf Publishing for the physical ARC.