SLASH AND BURN

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.